iPad Software Still Lacking?

Via Jason Snell:

After years of trying to make it work with just the iPad Pro, the advent of Apple silicon has made me go back to traveling with a MacBook Air. It’s small enough, powerful enough, and can do literally everything I need—something the iPad Pro just can’t.

And via Stephen Hackett:

The Problem’s Never the Hardware

This really resonates with me, the iPad hardware is really awesome, the software falls flat. I use my iPad every day for reading, browsing the web, watching videos, etc… The one time I needed to use it for ‘real’ work, logging into a remote machine using a terminal application and having to switch between that, notes and and editor was really painful, and what would have taken 10 minutes on a Mac took 2 hours on the iPad.

Finally I am with Jason Snell on this one:

I don’t have any idea if Apple really has any intention of letting macOS run on other devices, whether it’s an iPad or a Vision Pro or even an iPhone plugged into an external display. But it seems to me that if there’s any Apple product that is flexible enough to make it work, it’s the iPad Pro.

Being able to ‘bop’ my iPad into MacOS would make it ideal for me.

Passwords, Damn Passwords, What Are My Options?

A friend of mine just had hist Facebook account hacked and hijacked, so thought it a good time to recap good password hygiene:

Password Keychain. First and foremost use a password keychain, you are not going to remember all the passwords so save yourself grief by using a password keychain.

If you can’t use a password keychain then…

Always use long passwords, 12 random characters at a minimum, more is even better.

Always use a different password for each account, that way a thief can’t serially highjack your accounts.

Hopefully these two recommendations will prompt you to go back and use a password keychain.

Multi-Factor Authentication. It’s a pain but is really useful as a cross-check, I use it on all sites that provide it.

Sudden Death

Adam Engst

The sudden death of our friend and Take Control author Charles Edge emphasized how terrible things can happen to anyone at any time (see “Take Control Author Charles Edge Dies,” 22 April 2024). Those later on in life are usually more aware of their mortality and plan for it, but for younger people, it’s hard to contemplate the possibility of incapacitation or death, whether due to an accident or just bad luck.

Having had a (really) close call with the Grim Reaper last year, making sure that you have a plan in place for a trusted person to access your accounts is essential.

ARM and Apple Silicon

Fun history of ARM and Apple Silicon over at AppleInsider:

Looking back, it’s fairly clear that this necessary relationship with other firms — often with companies that Apple competed against on various levels — was not what co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs wanted. Apple was at the mercy of Motorola’s or Intel’s timelines, and sometimes shipping delays, which hurt Mac sales.

I was most interested in the two graphs near the bottom of the article.

One charts the performance of the A17 Pro vs the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in various phones. The two chips are roughly equivalent, and I would have liked to have seem performance vs. power consumption.

The other chart compares the performance of the M1 vs. M2 vs. M3. The performance increase is pretty much a straight line across generations. Again I would have liked to have seen performance vs. power consumption.

Regular Expression Primer

Howard Oakley over at The Eclectic Light Company has a very useful primer in Regular Expression,  including links to additional resources.

Z80

From REWIND and PLAY:

You can still buy 6502s from Western Design Center and others, but Zilog’s getting out of Z80s, announcing earlier this week that after June 14th you won’t be able to buy them anymore (specifically the last-part-standing Z84C00 which comes in various speeds from 6-20 MHz) and what you buy you can’t return.

Did not realize that the Z80 was still on sale, the first computer I used had a Z-80.

Vision Pro

Very interesting analysis of where the Vision Pro is going by Jason Snell: 

I’m not declaring that the Vision Pro has a special destiny because there’s no way to know that. But I do feel comfortable suggesting that those who are declaring it a dead end and a failed product might want to consider how foolish it would have been to say the same thing about a Commodore PET or TRS-80 in 1977.

I am not sure that we had to go as far back as the Commodore PET or TRS-80, the Apple Watch took few generation to settle on health as the prevalent use-case. The iPhone did not really come into its own until the 3G and/or 3GS, and the app store comes along. Heck, even Microsoft Windows did not make it until version 3.1.

The key is to release, see where the user go, iterate, and repeat. 

Google AI Chips

Interesting comment on Daring Fireball about making your own chips:

Alan Kay’s adage remains evergreen: “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”

What strikes me about the current proliferation of AI chips is that we seem to be at the start of a new evolution. Lots of different approaches and ideas, Nvidia is the current leader but that is a precarious place.

At the start of the computer revolution there were lots of different chips and architectures, it took a while before WinTel emerged as the clear winner. Feels like we are in a new era of competition now, and lots of new ideas. The chips market has not been this interesting in a long while.

Catching to up to TSMC

From ‘TSMC WILL BUILD THIRD ARIZONA FAB AFTER WINNING $6.6B IN CHIPS FUNDING’ on Daring Fireball:

The goal should be to jump ahead of Taiwan, not merely catch up. I suspect that’s just not remotely feasible, though. Still though, any domestic chip fabrication is better than no domestic chip fabrication.

There will be no jumping ahead unless TSMC trips up somehow but the way they have been moving show no sign of that.

Academic Journals, Presentation and Discoverability

Academic Journals, Presentation and Discoverability

I have recently been overhauling a crawler for a client. This crawler crawls the table of contents and articles for various academic journals, applies various extractions, markups and lookups, and stores the results into SQL database. A website provides a normalized format for review.

This crawler was originally built in 2018 and has been added to and updated over the years but got to a point where it was clear that a major refactoring was required.

Assumptions were made when it was build that did not hold over time, and articles and issues were being regularly missed by the crawler. Add to which the crawler was built around crawling RSS/RDF/ATOM feeds, these were well supported in 2018, but less well supported now.

RSS

As I mentioned before RSS/RDF/ATOM feeds are less well supported now than they were, there were a few lessons learned along the way.

First the feeds themselves are not always well thought out. Ideally we look for a feed for the current issue, and another feed for pre-prints, this provides the most flexibility in choosing what content you want to get we want pre-prints for some journals but not others. Some journals combine both in a single feed which is not ideal.

Second feeds are not well supported/maintained. It is clear that most of the money (if not all) comes in through the website. Iit is not unusual for them to lag behind the website, or stop being published entirely, only to skip issues when fixed.

I am a big advocate of feeds, they are lightweight and easy to produce, and a great way to keep up with a site but they seems to be relegated to a second-class (or third-class) citizen these days. So it is easier to crawl the website which leads me to…

Tables of Contents

There are two tables of contents we are interested in, the main one is the list of articles in an issue, no problems there, all journals handle this well, even when spread over multiple pages.

Things get a little more uneven with prior tables of content. Ideally a single page listing the current issue and prior issues in reverse chronological order would be best, so we can see all the issues at glance. Only one journal does this (out of about 40), others have tabs, pulldowns, accordions, etc… All this made discoverability quite complex, which leads me to…

Metadata

Most journals include metadata in the HTML which really help crawlers (and search engines) to parse what is important and index it. There are a number of metadata schemes available, Google Scholar, PRISM and Dublin Core are all very popular and it is a great idea to include all these. Open Graph is another but it is generic. The majority of journals include great metadata and it really helps.

The one negative is that I have not found an exhaustive list of Google Scholar metadata tags, the Google Scholar pages includes examples, but I was not able to find a definitive list, though this blog post lists the tags they have run into. We have seen some variability in how the metadata tags are used for which good documentation would really help.