Out of Cheese

I have got to get me some of these. Whether you can build something with them or not isn’t important. It’s just too cool.

(From Meg Worley.)

Mac OS X is five years old today. John Siracusa’s article about the occasion is a great read. So is Jens Alfke’s post, in which you can sense the pride that I and undoubtedly many of the other folks who have worked so hard on the OS feel. I still have my Apple shirt with the Mac OS X logo and “The future is here” on the front, and “March 24, 2001″ on the back, and every time I look at it I smile. I’m so glad I was able to be there for the start of the whole thing and that I’ve been able to contribute my share.

If you’d told me five years ago when I was struggling to get JavaSound to work in time for Mac OS X 10.0, that by this time in 2006 I’d've helped moved the operating system to Intel and would have code in lots of components of the system from the kernel to Mail, I would’ve thought you were insane. It’s been a great five years. I’m not even going to try to guess what I’ll have worked on by the time Mac OS X is ten. I’m sure it’ll be something I’d never expect today.

In the interim between working on Java (as an intern) and the Intel project, I was at Microsoft working on the Shared Source CLI, also known as Rotor. We shipped a 1.0 release in late 2002 for Windows, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X, and then most of the development team moved on. Yesterday, Rotor 2.0 shipped. Sadly, it retains one of the worst features of the 1.0 release and drops the bits that made it interesting to me. The one it retains is the license — you can do whatever you want with it, but you can’t use it commercially. That essentially restricts it to academia, which means that it’s all but impossible to build any sort of community around the software.

To make matters worse, Rotor 2.0 is only available for Windows. Much of the point of the original version was to show that the core of .NET was portable and to create interest in .NET and related Microsoft technologies among people who wouldn’t normally be using Microsoft products. In making the new version only available on Windows Microsoft appears to have given up on that point, at least for now. It’s a shame.

It’s obviously just a coincidence that Mac OS X’s fifth birthday and Rotor 2.0’s release were within a day of each other, but it presents a perfect opportunity for me to think about where I’ve been and what I’ve done professionally over the past five years. I don’t think I could’ve asked for anything better. Hopefully I’ll be able to post here again five years from now about how terrific the next five years have been.

I do a lot of work from home. Sometimes I can work on my home computers, but I often need to make changes in source code on systems in my office at work.

That’s always been somewhat annoying. I’ve used BBEdit for that because it can do SFTP, but BBEdit’s SFTP interface is to the rest of BBEdit what South Africa was to the World Baseball Classic. It’s there and it’s important, but it’s so much worse than the rest of the application that you don’t really want to use it. The SFTP interface is so awful that I found myself doing all kinds of convoluted tricks to get around having to use it — VNC, even — or just getting frustrated whenever I tried it.

About a week ago I decided to give Transmit 3 a shot. I bought Transmit (then Transit) the first day version 1.0 was released to the world back in 1997 and have always found it to be both fast and well-designed. I upgraded to Transmit 2 when it came out, but I hadn’t used it in a few years because I just don’t use FTP any more.

Transmit 3.5 was released a month ago as a universal application, with a new feature called “Edit in Whatever” that lets you remotely edit any file in any application. I saw the release announcement in Steven Frank’s weblog and was intrigued, but it wasn’t until last week that I put two and two together and realized that Transmit might work nicely as a solution for my remote editing problem.

So I tried it, and wow. I’m amazed. I’d gone all this time thinking that SFTP was just slow (BBEdit’s SFTP is painfully slow) or that there wasn’t any way to do a fast file browser over FTP (the Finder’s FTP file system is painfully slow). Transmit is just unbelievably fast. And its UI is great. I can get it to do exactly what I want, and it does things immediately. Did I mention that it’s fast? I just can’t get over the fact that I can double-click a file in Transmit, have it pop up in BBEdit, change it, save it, and have everything happen so smoothly and so quickly that I’d never know I was working with a remote system. Very, very cool.

Now if only the guys at Panic could come up with a way for me to go back in time and recover the hours I’ve lost by not using Transmit all this time…. Or if the fine folks at Bare Bones could add an option to BBEdit that would bring Transmit forward when I press command-shift-O….

More reading of this week’s New York Times Magazine got me to look up the history of the Dutch tulip bubble. For those of you who aren’t quite as into history, the Dutch tulip bubble was the first generally recognized economic “bubble”, occurring in the mid-1600s when crazed investors bid up the price of tulip bulbs, of all things, to a ridiculous amount before the market crashed. People often draw analogies between the tulip bubble and the dotcom bubble or today’s real estate prices.

Problem is, apparently there was no tulip bubble. A bit of reading in Wikipedia and Slate points out that what actually happened was that a slip in the tulip futures market — yes, they had futures markets in the 17th century — caused some well-connected investors to push through a law changing existing tulip futures contracts into tulip options contracts. This substantially reduced investors’ risk, thereby pushing up prices dramatically as you’d expect in any normal market. The price increases started when the law took effect, but they didn’t settle down until the law was announced a few months later. Investors who had inside knowledge therefore came out ahead, as you’d expect.

So the next time someone claims that modern markets are being irrational and points to the Dutch and their tulips, you might want to think about whether the new markets are as irrational as they sound. Maybe the markets are insane, but we can’t blame that on anything that started with tulips.

As someone who’s been thinking of buying a house for a while now and for whom a Bay Area mortgage would stretch the budget rather thin, I’ve been very interested in the mortgage-interest tax deduction. For anyone out there who isn’t a homeowner or prospective homeowner, that’s a part of the tax code that allows you to deduct interest on mortgages, which for the first few years of a mortgage is usually a significant portion of the payments.

Today’s New York Times Magazine has a fascinating article about how the mortgage-interest deduction isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Specifically, it overwhelmingly helps the rich, and it doesn’t seem to boost homeownership at all. Given that, I’m suddenly a lot less enamored with it than I was an hour ago. In fact, I’m inclined to agree with the tax reform panel that unanimously decided that the mortgage-interest deduction should be scrapped as part of a plan to simplify the tax code and eliminate the AMT. Sadly, it looks like that plan was dead on arrival in Congress.