There’s a big hangup people have over the word freedom. In these big debates about the role of platform vendors and who can block whose products, the word “freedom” gets thrown around in the context of platform vendors destroying it.

But freedom is something only governments can destroy, because only governments have the power to compel by force actions that people would not choose for themselves. If your choice is not forced and you have an alternative, then your freedom is intact.

In a free society, people are able to associate with whom they please. This includes the freedom not to associate as well. And this extends to companies and products. I am free not to buy a Maytag washer. Shop owners are free not to stock products that they don’t like. Microsoft is free to reject games from its Xbox platform that don’t meet its standards. Black people are free not to hang out with Asians.

Any individual consumer can opt not to purchase an Apple device and thus bypass the app store restrictions entirely, in the same way that consumers can buy a PS3 or a Wii if they don’t agree with the games Microsoft has let onto their platform. In the smartphone market, people can buy a device with Android on it. They can get a Microsoft Kin. They’ll be able to buy Windows Phone 7 devices soon. Choice exists.

This is freedom: the ability to choose between several options with no entity able to compel you by force to choose their own offering. If you find Apple’s app store rules stifling and controlling, then don’t buy an iPhone! It’s that simple.

So Apple is not “destroying freedom” by failing to include Adobe’s Flash in their products because it owns and controls the platform and there’s nothing wrong with that. If Apple doesn’t have the right to determine what happens on its platform, then a gay bar doesn’t have the right to keep out straight hecklers and you don’t have the right to keep out of your own house people that scare or repulse you.

Why? Because this is about property rights. Apple’s platform is their property; should they have the right to do with it as they please, including keeping out those they don’t want in it? I argue that they have as much right to this as we all have to our own property. If Apple can be compelled by force to “open up” their App store, what does that say about the sanctity of your domain should people decide they don’t like the color you’ve chosen for your veranda or appreciate that you didn’t let those hungry bikers in at 3 AM?

Choosing what one wants with one’s own property is not evil, and we should stop acting like it is. Free societies endure precisely because people can make their own decisions about their bodies, their minds, their property, their wealth, and their lives. Let’s stop being busybodies and criticizing others for their choices, and instead work on making better choices ourselves.

John Paczkowski : Cross-platform mobile apps tend not to take advantage of native features unique to each device. What do you have to say about complaints that write-once-run-anywhere software results in subpar apps?

Chuck Geschke : Well, people don’t say that about Photoshop. They certainly don’t say it about Acrobat….I’m a little confused about what the real examples of that are. If there’s a problem with the performance of Flash as demonstrated on the iPhone, it’s because we haven’t been able to access the inner layers of hardware and software we need to to provide the kind of performance we can provide on other platforms. But that’s Apple’s choice, not ours. And now, of course, you can’t use it at all.

For years, Mac users have been yelling and screaming for Adobe to finally come out with products that respect the Mac user interface by using Cocoa, taking advantage of OS X-specific features, not overriding standard controls, and not resulting in UI nightmares. We want native OS X apps that use OS X’s features and look and feel right alongside other first-class Apple apps, not this cross-platform garbage that throws shit all over our disks, practically has a different user interface theme for every dialog box, and re-implements native controls in weird, incorrect ways. We hate it, and we hate them for making it.

I find it extremely telling that when confronted with these issues, Geschke doesn’t even think there’s a problem. No wonder it seems like our gripes are going ignored; they are! I mean, the guy thinks Mac users “certainly don’t say it about Acrobat”? Please. Don’t insult my intelligence.

Literally not comprehending how much your customers hate you and your products isn’t the greatest business strategy I’ve ever heard of.

Then there’s this:

John Paczkowski : Any thoughts on Steve Jobs’s claim that “Flash was created during the PC era–for PCs and mice”?

Chuck Geschke : What do you think an iPhone is? It’s a personal computer.

Wrong. It may be a computer, but it’s not a PC.

Steve Jobs isn’t saying that iPhones don’t have processors and memory and input devices and the like; what he’s saying is that the experience of handling a mobile device fundamentally differs from the experience of sitting down in front of a screen, and keyboard, and a mouse. If this clown can’t understand what Jobs is saying when he talks about the difference between conventional PCs and mobile devices, then I seriously worry about his company’s future. Cultures change. Markets change. If you don’t adapt to them, then you’re dead. End of story.

The $600 Flash authoring tool is the only way to produce Flash applications.

The free Mac OS X Developer tools (that require an $800+ Mac computer) are the only way to produce iPhone and iPad applications.

Both systems are as closed as each other.

The WordPress people also let you have a blog as a subdomain of wordpress.com; e.g. you can register and post to mymomsfancypants.wordpress.com if you wanted. I’ve used these simple hosted blogs in the past and I still do. Like many hosted services, there are some restrictions, and by and large you can live with them. But I just ran into one that bugs me. A lot.

You see, the WordPress people are anal about security. Like, really anal about security. I can’t say I blame them because their servers are the ones storing your content end executing your code, but I bumped up against this tonight in a really frustrating way. You see, you can’t embed code in your website. Like, if you try to put the following in your post:

“<object width="400" height="225"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="movie" value="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7970212&amp;server=vimeo.com&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=1&amp;show_portrait=0&amp;color=&amp;fullscreen=1" /><embed src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7970212&amp;server=vimeo.com&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=1&amp;show_portrait=0&amp;color=&amp;fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="400" height="225"></embed></object><p><a href="http://vimeo.com/7970212">Reel</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user1398023">Rafael Hernán Gamboa</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>”

then nothing will happen. In most civilized universes, the server will reach out and turn this into a video or something, but not in WordPress.com-land! Needless to say, this is so annoying that the WordPress people were bound to hear, shall we say, quite an earful. So they helpfully put in some hooks to let you use popular services, such as YouTube, so you can put things like “[Youtube="www.someYouTubeURL"]“.

This is fine if you want to put in a YouTube video, but what about Vimeo or iBBC or some other embeddable thing that WordPress hasn’t added in support for yet? Well, I’ll tell you what, You’re Screwed, with a capital Y and a capital S and make sure you don’t drop the soap.

I can understand the security motivations, but really, is this nursery school or something? You can’t embed video?! There are other hosted solutions that embed video, and I don’t see them collapsing under the weight of their pwnz0red servers! What a drag.

Normal URLs

Legit:

• www.google.com
• www.paypal.com

Fraud/phishing/virus/junk:

• http://cash4u2nite.ru
• http://188.221.3.88

Shortened URLs

Legit:

• http://bit.ly/14d7yE
• http://tinyurl.com/oex2e

Fraud/phishing/virus/junk:

• http://ow.ly/Dhdo
• http://tr.im/Fckc

See the problem? It’s impossible for even a seasoned internet-goer to tell which of the shortened URLs lead to unsafe websites. We’ve all gotten used to clicking on these anonymous links without having any idea where they’ll take us. And this is all in addition to the problem of link rot as the shortening services go belly-up once their backers discover there’s no money to be made in it. Just say no!

I think law is something that comes rather easily to engineers, since it’s basically just [a] boolean logic system, but written in plain English. If (A || B || C) && !D && !E is true, you’re violating the statute. There is a system to it, and legal structures are less complicated than even simple microprocessors. Law also has obscure exceptions to generally given rules, which is something you also come across a lot in computer engineering. Computer engineers deal with bugs, just as judges must deal with poorly drafted legislation that yields absurd, clearly unintended results.

To a thought process that’s heavily oriented towards systems and logical structure, law provides, in many ways, much more interesting puzzles and conundrums. Unlike with circuits, where there’s just a right way and a wrong way to do things, law provides much more opportunity for philosophical exploration.

It’s certainly been true for me. I also think that one of the reasons that logical engineery people get frustrated with politicians easily is that unlike engineers, they often seem to have no interest in fixing the “bugs” in laws, and flawed laws often remain on the books for years or decades despite widespread knowledge of their existence. It’s the job of a good engineer to fix the bugs in his code or his spec, but the job of a politician entails so much wheeling-and-dealing and the need to please diverse constituencies that a lot of the kinks will never get ironed out. Imagine if corporate engineers were also their own managers — just think of how shoddy most products would be! That’s basically how politics works.

Interestingly enough, this is why early 20th-century social theorist and economist Thorstein Veblen believed that the ideal society would be run by engineers, creating what would be known as the the Technocracy movement. Veblen was sort of a crackpot, and despised athletes, priests, soldiers, and others who he viewed as merely predatorily looting what the creative engineers had produced. His ideas never made it very far because, as you can imagine, priests, athletes, and soldiers remain some of the most popular kinds of people.

I have it on my media center/gaming PC and it’s pretty wonderful. It loads at boot, so I only have to look at Windows XP’s ugly mug for a second or two before it opens. I have access to my ripped DVDs and quite a few intertubes worth of content, and the user interface is quite nice too. Alas, it has a pretty silly logo:

Well, it is open-source! [rimshot] In all seriousness, there are some quirks and things you have to do for yourself, such as figure out a way to control it from your couch. That was actually one of the biggest issues I had with it for a while. I would lug over my big ol’ 104-key keyboard, which sort of breaks you out of the illusion that you’re not actually sitting in front of a Windows box. Luckily, there’s a free Boxee app that basically turns your iPhone into a remote control! Problem solved.

Beyond that, I really only have only good things to say. It’s obviously not for your grandparents as it requires creating on online account and manually installing and configuring it, but anyone who can use a web browser and Word can accomplish it all easily enough. And did I mention it’s free?

What I have stumbled on is the Canon CanoScan LIDE 100 scanner.¹ It’s a very neat, very thin, and very cheap desktop scanner. You can get the dang thing for about 60 or 70 bucks, but when I found a $50 deal on Amazon a few months ago, I had to pull the trigger. Here’s what it looks like on my desk beside a horde of Orks and Tyranids:

I can’t really say much about the included software because I tossed it out without even looking at it. My time in IT has taught me that scanner software that comes from the manufacturer is universally, 100% shoddy beyond belief. Why is this? I’m honestly confused.

I instead elected to use Mac OS X’s built-in Image Capture software, which I find to be not only perfectly sufficient for my purposes, but also quite pleasant to use (caveat: I’m talking about the Snow Leopard version. In Leopard and before, it’s kinda lousy too). The scan button on the front even opens Image Capture and starts a scan, just like it should! How cool is that?

I mostly use it for scanning receipts, documents, and things like that, because I am obsessed with disaster preparedness and I want records of everything I own in case the place blows up and my renter’s insurance company is being a dick. For that purpose, the scans it produces are perfectly nice-looking, and text is extremely sharp and crisp.

In terms of speed, I have to admit it’s not the fastest scanner in the world. From placing the document on the bed to having a file on disk, it’ll probably take you maybe 30-45 seconds to have a finished product. But that’s perfectly suitable for my relatively infrequent needs.

The one issue I’ve had is that sometimes Image Capture can’t find the scanner. I don’t know if this is Image Capture or the scanner’s fault, but momentarily unplugging it never fails to beat whichever is the guilty party into comprehension of the other. Works for me!

For a $50 scanner, it’s held up great, and produces good results. It makes a great addition to my home office and if you need an unobtrusive, low-duty scanner, this one is pretty nice.

Update: I forgot to mention that the scanner is also USB-powered, which means that it doesn’t have to be plugged into the wall, which saves power and reduces clutter. I find it sort of silly that I neglected to mention this, since it was one of the primary features that drew me to it! Oh well, better late then never.

1. FCC notice: you’ll never know whether or not Canon has sent me free stuff, fuckers! Bite me.

A goodly portion of my job involved SSHing into remote servers and editing text files. This limits me to command-line tools and doesn’t allow me to take advantage of any of the GUI workflow enhancements and productivity boosters I’ve built up over the years, including a heavily-customized TextMate and a knowledge of Mac editing shortcuts. That, and I’m really lousy in vi and emacs.

But ExpanDrive has changed my life. here’s how it works: you type in your SSH credentials, and instead of giving you a terminal window, it mounts the remote volume on your local machine just like a flash drive. Did you catch that? It mounts your remote home directory over SSH. Read: you can interact with your files using GUI tools over an SSH connection! This is nothing short of revolutionary for me, a long-time adherent of powerful GUI tools. Since I started using it last night, my productivity for one particularly annoying task to accomplish purely using a command line has probably doubled.

Under the hood it uses MacFUSE, which, as far as I’m concerned, it basically magic. All I care about is that it lets me mount remote volumes over SSH. I’m still in the 30-day trial period, so haven’t bought it yet, but honestly, whatever it costs, I’ll pay. It’s just that good.

If you spend any amount of time manipulating files over SSH, you owe it to yourself to use this application. No, really. Go download it right now.