One of the minor annoyances with OS X over the years had been that Apple’s iCal application’s icon has a date on it, but only showed the correct date if the application was open. When the application was closed, it showed the date July 17. The fact that the incorrect date was prominently displayed on the screen whenever iCal was closed was a slight annoyance.

With OS X 10.5, the problem is solved. The latest version of iCal shows the correct date whether or not the application is running. How this was accomplished has been a bit of a mystery, but Mac developer Ahruman has figured it out.

This is the sort of thing that separates Apple from most other companies. When you use Leopard, you find that Apple tried to improve just about everything in these small but important ways. Granted, some of those attempted improvements have backfired — I’ve read complaints about the changes to how the Terminal application works (I find it vastly improved), the fact that help windows now float above other windows on the screen all the time, and the updated appearance of the Dock. Compare that to Windows, where users have had to deal with the same rotten command prompt window for over fifteen years. A total overhaul was promised for Vista, but didn’t make it in, so people still make do with a tool that doesn’t behave in any way like a normal application window and doesn’t even offer decent support for copy and paste.

It’s the little sorts of improvements like the new iCal icon that explain why I like Apple’s products so much.

Greg Knauss has a theory on why developers often make poor managers. Here’s a snippet:

The manager must be involved with each and every project, but at the highest level. He doesn’t care about the race condition that’s plaguing the project three levels down, he just cares what the impact on the schedule is going to be. And when he gets that information, he gratefully moves on. He gets to talk to a lot of people, and go to presentations and say “we” when listing progress, and assemble the stakeholders at the steering committee to gain consensus to move forward. Digging in isn’t what managers do. If they do, they’re micromanagers, or “assholes.” The programmer, though, wants to be involved deeply and profoundly in just a few projects — he wants to own them, top to bottom. Maybe it’s a whole program, or a single feature, or some underlying library. Whatever. He wants to live in it, neck-deep. He has to worry about all — literally all — of the obscure technical details that make computers go. Jumping between projects — context switching — is a great way to burn a programmer out, because the cost of unloading one project from his head only to load up another one is enormously high. The idea of switching between two projects in a day, much less ten, is not only exhausting, but depressing.

Interestingly, I usually prefer “wide” to “deep” but I’m mostly a programmer. That said, I know exactly which kinds of projects suit my talents and which don’t, and try hard to avoid those that don’t.

Hopefully you won’t be surprised to learn that the Bush administration treats the prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba as just another political tool to help build support for its policies. We learn this from recent statements made by Colonel Morris Davis, the chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantanamo, who resigned last month.

Here’s how we decide which of the detainees should be charged with crimes:

According to Davis, for more than a year Pentagon officials have sought to influence his decisions about “who we will charge, what we will charge, what evidence we will try to introduce, and how we will conduct a prosecution.” For example, speaking last week to the Wall Street Journal, he explained that in September 2006, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England discussed with him the “strategic political value” in charging some of the prisoners before the midterm elections. Similarly, in January 2007, Pentagon General Counsel William J. Haynes II (himself on the verge of being withdrawn as a nominee for the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals because of his involvement with the infamous “torture memos”) telephoned Davis to prod him to charge David Hicks, apparently as a political accommodation to the Australian Prime Minister. Even after Haynes was advised that this interference was improper, he again called Davis, suggesting that he charge other prisoners at the same time to avoid the impression that the charges were “a political solution to the Hicks case.”

More recently, Davis filed a formal complaint alleging that Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann, the Legal Advisor to the authority overseeing the military commissions process, had pushed him to file cases that would attract more public attention and garner support for the tribunal system, even though such cases would require secretive, closed proceedings. (By Pentagon regulation, the Legal Advisor is supposed to be an impartial administrator of justice, not an arm of the prosecution.)

You can be certain that the Bush administration and its defenders will vilify Colonel Davis, but let’s be clear on one thing, until recently, he was a devoted member of that camp:

For years, Davis has been the Administration’s de facto spokesperson in defense of the military commissions. He has penned encomiums to Guantánamo in publications from the New York Times to the Yale Law Journal, where he decried “those who want to sell a false and ugly picture of the facilities and the process.” Last year, Davis was particularly vociferous in attacking Major Michael Mori, David Hicks’s defense counsel, for speaking in public about the failures of the Guantánamo legal system, even suggesting that Mori could be charged under Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice for speaking contemptuously about top U.S. officials.

All this just goes to illustrate why the United States has a Constitution and Bill of Rights in the first place. Given extreme power and extreme secrecy, any government will regress toward corruption. Having allowed the Bush administration to invent a bunch of exceptions where our legal system doesn’t apply will haunt us for a long time to come.

(Link via Unqualified Offerings.)

Comet is a new term that’s been coined to describe the modern incarnation of server push. Most Web applications that update a Web page in real time use polling to grab updates from the server. Comet refer to Web pages that maintain a live connection to the server and allow the server to push data onto the page whenever it likes. Alex Russell explains exactly how Comet works and provides some pointers to the server-side tools that provide Comet support.

Comet Daily is a new group blog on the subject.

People for Internet Responsibility has launched a new effort to monitor network providers for violations of network neutrality called NNSquad. It seems unlikely that we’ll ever see a law enforcing network neutrality, and there are very good arguments that such a law would be impossible to enforce or would hurt more than it helps.

Network providers aren’t going to post on their Web sites when they discriminate against various forms of traffic or against various content providers, so it’s up to users to keep an eye on them and gather the information that enables markets to work. That’s where NNSquad comes in:

The project’s focus includes detection, analysis, and incident reporting of any anticompetitive, discriminatory, or other restrictive actions on the part of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or affiliated entities, such as the blocking or disruptive manipulation of applications, protocols, transmissions, or bandwidth; or other similar behaviors not specifically requested by their customers.

Other key aspects of the project are discussions, technology development and deployment, and associated activities — fostering cooperation and mutually agreeable methodologies whenever possible — aimed at keeping the Internet a maximally unhindered, useful, competitive, fair, and open environment for the broadest possible range of applications and services.

PFIR has lined up a number of notable people to head up the group. Hopefully the effort will turn out to be productive.

The Google Phone has arrived, except that it’s not a phone. It’s an open source operating system for handsets that’s based on Linux and that will be released under an Apache license. Google has lined up an impressive list of handset makers and carriers who will be adopting Android.

This really is great news. It’s wide open, it’s got enough big names behind it that it’s nearly certain to take off, and it puts pressure on Apple to open up the iPhone. I expect that we’ll remember 2007 as the year when the mobile phone industry underwent a fundamental change, shifting power away from carriers and toward the people who actually have to use the phones.

Update: A lot of people are pointing out that the Android is vaporware. If the carriers don’t buy handsets with Android or the handset makers decide not to install it on their devices, then of course this announcement won’t amount to much. It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes Google to release an emulator like the Symbian emulator that’s available.

Last week, I talked about Apple’s self-perception as a struggling company, fighting for good taste in a world of mediocrity. These predictions from the past are why Apple fans still cheer when the company includes Easter Eggs in its products that poke fun at Windows, despite the fact that the company is now a gorilla in the music industry and is stronger than it has ever been.

Being forced to listen to those kinds of predictions for years created the “us against the world” attitude that many Apple fans (including myself) still exhibit. I think that most Apple fans in the mid-1990s knew in their bones at the time that all of those grim predictions were very likely accurate. They turned out to be wrong, but only because Apple did a good job with OS X and made a great bet with the iPod.

Update: This post has been edited for clarity.

Ars Technica notes that in the wake of the OiNK bust, many sites have already been launched to take its place. As the article says, in the end the OiNK bust will probably already make things worse for the music industry in terms of file sharing. Before the bust, I didn’t even know that there were invite-only BitTorrent trackers that provided access to comprehensive libraries of music. So the bust eliminated a resource that’s relatively easy to duplicate, and exposed the idea of it to thousands of people who may not have even thought about seeking out such a thing. The most interesting thing I learned from the OiNK bust is that plenty of people in the music industry were members.

In his interview with Justin Turnipseed at kottke.org, Cory Doctorow explained the economic, artistic, and ethical reasons why he makes his books freely available online. Here’s the ethical reason:

And the ethical reason is that the alternative is that we chide, criminalize, sue, damn our readers for doing what readers have always done, which is sharing books they love—only now they’re doing it electronically. You know, there’s no solution that arises from telling people to stop using computers in the way that computers were intended to be used. They’re copying machines. So telling the audience for art, telling 70 million American file-sharers that they’re all crooks, and none of them have the right to due process, none of them have the right to privacy, we need to wire-tap all of them, we need to shut down their network connections without notice in order to preserve the anti-copying business model: that’s a deeply unethical position. It puts us in a world in which we are criminalizing average people for participating in their culture.

I’d feel a lot better if I thought the music, television, and movie industries were fighting a rearguard action to buy time to execute some brilliant new strategy. Unfortunately, I think they’re making their last stand on a pretty rotten piece of ground to defend.

Here’s Tyler Cowen writing about areas where the UN is successful:

I don’t hold the extreme view that the UN always fails. It is possibly good when there is a general consensus for action (UNESCO World Heritage sites), or when a well-targeted military action has a defined purpose. The UN is very bad at developing and enforcing open-ended commitments, and very bad at constructing well-run institutions.

The wider topic is the Law of the Sea Treaty, which isn’t really all that interesting unless you are more intrigued than the average person by international conventions and regulatory bodies. What is interesting to me is that his description of the strengths and weaknesses of the UN is that I think they apply to technology standards bodies as well.

The least effective standards tend to be those that are created by consortia to attempt to map out the future direction of new developments. In fact, I’d go so far as to say those standards are often unsuccessful. They tend to be overly complex, difficult to implement, and tend to map poorly to the real problem space they were aimed at. In the end, they can be hinder innovation. The most successful standards are usually those that formalize conventions that are being applied.

Freedom to Tinker writers Andrew Appel and Ed Felten have put together a series of three posts you must read about AT&T data mining its call records on behalf of the government. How does the system work? The first post explains:

What is the “communities of interest” technology? It’s spelled out very clearly in a 2001 research paper from AT&T itself, entitled “Communities of Interest” (by C. Cortes, D. Pregibon, and C. Volinsky). They use high-tech data-mining algorithms to scan through the huge daily logs of every call made on the AT&T network; then they use sophisticated algorithms to analyze the connections between phone numbers: who is talking to whom? The paper literally uses the term “Guilt by Association” to describe what they’re looking for: what phone numbers are in contact with other numbers that are in contact with the bad guys?

When this research was done, back in the last century, the bad guys where people who wanted to rip off AT&T by making fraudulent credit-card calls. (Remember, back in the last century, intercontinental long-distance voice communication actually cost money!) But it’s easy to see how the FBI could use this to chase down anyone who talked to anyone who talked to a terrorist. Or even to a “terrorist.”

In the second post, Appel explains AT&T’s potential financial motive for eavesdropping:

Therefore, if it’s true that AT&T has such a secret room, then it may be simply that this is the only way AT&T knows how to make money off of shipping bits: it sells to the government all the information that passes through. Furthermore, economics tells us that in a commodity market, if one vendor is able to lower its price below cost, then other vendors must follow unless they also are able to make up the difference somehow. That is, there will be substantial economic pressure on all the other telecoms to accept the government’s money in exchange for access to everybody’s mail, Google searches, and phone calls.

In the third post, Ed Felten explains the economics of such a hypothetical arrangement. The post defies summarization, so just go read it.

There’s plenty more on the secret rooms in AT&T facilities that Appel discusses.