Clouds

James Fallows:

How could big tech companies offer cloud services to hundreds of millions of people without better guarding their data against catastrophic loss? On Google’s side, one explanation involved complexities of the law. My wife and I might think that Google had a “duty” to be able to find her messages after some hacker had erased them. But according to Google’s legal department, its higher and more stringent duty is to ensure that messages are erased, if whoever is in charge of an account wants them gone.

If you don’t back up your own files, the cloud is probably safer storage than your hard drive. But if you do, Apple and Google’s cloud technologies take away your control without really offering the kind of professional management that you might expect. When Fallows’ wife tried to restore the six years of e-mail that the hacker had deleted, Google’s automated systems only found four month’s worth and e-mailed to say, “We unfortunately will not be able to respond to any further emails on this case.”

It remains to be seen how iCloud will handle this sort of situation, but at first glance it seems to abstract away from files even more. Mail and iCal maintain local caches that theoretically could be re-imported if you had your own backups of them. But there’s no folder on your hard drive that corresponds to the current contents of your Photo Stream, and the only thing you can do from the Web interface is to completely erase it. (If you regularly import the Photo Stream into Aperture or iPhoto, you could back up those applications’ files.) iWork documents currently don’t sync down to your Mac at all. The general iCloud document approach seems to be to make it appear as though there are no files.

Not having files makes some things easier on the surface, so long as everything is working perfectly. But the lack of tools to do the sorts of things that we do with files creates other problems. If something gets messed up in your cloud, you can’t just go in and fix it. And good luck getting someone at Google to help you.

Dropbox, on the other hand, seems to have hit a sort of pragmatic sweet spot. It’s less ambitious, in a way, but it doesn’t take away your favorite tools. My Mac always has a full copy of everything, in a normal folder that I can back up, search, re-arrange, etc. Multiple iPhone text editors can share the same folder with BBEdit. Nothing is locked away in a silo, only accessible through a specialized client application. Everything is viewable and editable from the Web site.

iCloud offers some syncing services for Core Data, which Dropbox cannot match (without a lot of custom work). But for regular documents, compared with Dropbox, it does not seem to offer me any benefits as a user. The details are hidden, At Ease–style. I suppose to Apple that’s a feature, but I hope that the applications I use will continue to support more open approaches such as Dropbox.

Update (2011-10-25): Ted Landau on Losing iWork documents in iCloud.

Aperture Apple Mail Cloud Core Data Dropbox iCal iCloud Photo Stream

Tower 1.2

Tower, my primary Git client, now has views for file history and blame. I’m not really a fan of the popovers, though. Next up, I’d like to see searching of file contents.

iPhone Accelerometer Keylogging

Chris Foresman:

Researchers at Georgia Tech and MIT have developed a proof of concept to demonstrate that it is possible to record a computer user’s keystrokes using an iPhone 4’s accelerometer. The researchers developed a method to accurately translate the vibrations from typing on a keyboard picked up by the device’s accelerometer when placed on a desk near a PC.

Python’s for/else

Ned Batchelder:

As the loop executes, the “if” becomes like a giant if/elif/elif ladder: each time around the loop adds another test of the condition, but only if all previous tests were false. The “else” clause caps it all off, just as it would in an explicit if/elif/else structure. And it works just like the explicit structure: if all of the conditions are false, then the “else” clause is run.

Even though I understand the problem this is trying to solve, I have never found it intuitive. I still have to think when reading or writing one of these loops. It just doesn’t seem worth it for such a small gain.

Siri Dictation Commands

Jim Rhoades (via Erik Barzeski) lists some spacing, punctuation, and capitalization voice commands that Siri recognizes. I’ve yet to figure out how to escape these, when I want the literal word. Maybe it will improve with practice, but my early impression is that dictation is not very useful for entering notes. Between mistaken homophones and regular mistakes and the times when it does nothing at all, it’s less frustrating to just type. It’s potentially more useful when you really want to avoid typing, e.g. while driving, although it’s not accurate enough that I feel like I could avoid looking at the screen to check that it got something close to right.