Donald Jenkins

MobileMe felt like deliverance from evil after tinkering with Microsoft Exchange—but it has irritating issues of its own that Apple, which isn’t interested in delivering a credible cloud package, has done nothing to redress. Google Apps, which was only usable for email when I switched to MobileMe in 2008, has quietly improved the reliability and power of its data server systems and made them totally compliant with the Mac, iPhone and iPad. I’ve now switched to Google Apps servers for everything, except for contacts, for the time being, because they’re still in beta and can only be synced with the iPhone via Microsoft Exchange, which produces rather haphazard results. Email uses IMAP and calendar event sync via CalDAV.

The recent case of an Ohio judge locked in a dispute with a local newspaper over an anonymous comment posted on its website using her email address has given a vivid illustration of how the shift to contributing content to the Internet under your own name has radically changed the nature of interaction on the Web since it started in the middle of the last decade and gathered pace between 2007 and 2009, powerfully assisted by the emergence of Facebook, a notably proponent of being transparent about your identity, in the social network sector. Content quality, on balance is improved immeasurably if people are prepared to stand up for they are saying. Does this mean people will comment less? Probably. Does it matter all that much? I don’t think so. So long as Mr Zuckerberg doesn’t kill my privacy, its still possible to share content with selected audiences, but not everyone, on Facebook, while a public blog, and content one posts to third-party sites, reflects views one is happy to own up to.

I haven’t yet had an iPad in my hands. But I don’t need to handle one to know that I don’t like it at all. It’s symptomatic of everything I don’t like about the ‘new’ Apple: as David Pogue points out in his excellent New York Times review, the device is ‘patently absurd’ from a tecchie’s point of view; and conversely, it’s a delight for non-tecchies. The question now is whether Apple will desert the tecchie segment altogether. Tecchies are the trend-setters and the consumer will eventually suffer if those that create content for him have nowhere to go to.

For the past four years I’ve been writing blog articles, taking photographs, tweeting and saving news items. This blog has been the hub of my web presence, but I’ve consistently been present on Twitter, Flickr and Google Reader, and occasionally also posted links elsewhere. But from the start, I’ve tried to provide people with a way of keeping track of everything I post in one place. For some time, I used Tumblr and Friendfeed to do this, but those solutions were pretty dysfunctional. I’ve now set up a lifestream , using Sweetcron, a rather clever open-source project, hosted on my own server, that aggregates all my stuff (except for Facebook posts, which are private) in one, funky, 1970s-inspired stream of blog posts, photos, tweets and links.

Taking inspiration from Michael Arrington and Kevin Rose (I didn’t think Kevin Rose would ever be a source of inspiration, but maybe I’m just feeling lazy), I’ve succumbed to the trend. Here’s the list of stuff I couldn’t possibly do without. It’s much shorter than theirs, and has all the right, cool stuff. If I’m still around, I’ll update it in 2011.

I’m in no doubt that America needs universal health care for the same reasons that Europe needed it in 1945: it’s morally unacceptable, in a rich society, that anyone should be denied it for financial reasons. The bill presently before Congress is clearly perfectible, but in reality, arguments against it are but thinly-veiled pretexts barely concealing the selfishness and economic ignorance underlying Mr Obama’s opponents on this issue.

In an update to a post I wrote in 2007 about the tools I use to compose blog posts, I cover using MarsEdit for editing posts on my desktop, in combination with WriteRoom and TextMate. I explain how I’ve started using Amazon Cloudfront to store my images. I also cover new trends in caching and ways of using Markdown to produce cleaner code including, optionally, using it as the storage format for individual blog posts, using Michel Fortin’s PHP Markdown plugin.

England is a Protestant country, make no mistake about it. It’s a deeply embedded part of her identity. And whether you be Protestant or Catholic, from a dogmatic point of view, is decidedly not the point at issue: we can all agree that when England ceases to be a Protestant country, a not insignificant part of her glory, earned in the battle-field and in defence of liberty far more than in the pulpit, will have been extinguished for ever. Sadly, the Protestant settlement resulting from the Glorious Revolution and the Act of Settlement no longer appears to command the slightest respect either from HM Government or from the Tory Opposition, one can conclude that it will be consigned to the dustbin of History at some point between now and the next Proclamation.

The time has come to consolidate all the posts I’ve written since 2005 in a variety of guises, in one language and one site. The language, of course, had to be English and the site had to be donaldjenkins.net. I did toy for a while with the idea of running a bilingual blog. But the SEO implications of this were unclear and I thought it might be overkill. So I translated all the old blog posts, which hadn’t been available online for nearly two years, and uploaded them, for the first time, to this site. They have occasionally been made more concise, and comments (which were in French anyway) haven’t been preserved. You can browse through them by visiting the archives.

France has historically been a cradle of cutting-edge technology and to this day remains a world leader in the field of mathematics. Yet in recent years it has gradually departed from that stance and has increasingly turned into a sort of cultural but irrelevant Disneyland, while America has gained, as a result of the revolution induced by the PC and the Internet, a dominant, indeed monopolistic position in the field of information technology. Why has the forced diet of mathematics not fuelled the emergence of a string of French Stanfords, MITs and Georgia Techs? Why do clever young French people have zero knowledge of, or interest in, information technology? And, most puzzlingly of all, why is new technology not seriously taught in France’s best engineering schools, whose graduates are mostly ignorant of even basic programming skills?