“Everyone is built for running.” — Eric Orton, page 203.

What a fantastic book. The night I first picked it up intending to read a couple chapters Ohio addiction centers ended with me forcing myself to stop and go to bed after tearing through half the book. Months later, I still haven’t stopped thinking about it. There’s plenty here even if you have no interest in running, and I wholeheartedly recommend reading it.

My first introduction to Born to Run and the nascent (now ascendent) barefoot running movement was this October, 2009 New York Times video and blog entry, The Roving Runner Goes Barefoot. A few months later, after repeatedly seeing the book mentioned around the web, I finally decided I might as well read it too.

This was towards the beginning of the year when, after about three years of running regularly, I decided to start taking running a little more seriously. In addition to reading the book, I also joined New York Road Runners, applied for the 2010 NY Marathon (didn’t get in) and have more than doubled my average weekly miles.

Like many others, I found the book to be profoundly inspirational, bordering on life-changing, and I ended up with a lot to say. This post is sort of the introduction to a series of posts directly or indirectly inspired by Born to Run. As they’re finished I’ll be linking them here.

• Born to Run: Something of an Epilogue
• Running Technique

The book is filled with quotable passages, but this from chapter 27 (page 213) really stuck with me because it mirrors my own experience:

“Because I was eating lighter and hadn’t been laid up once by injury, I was able to run more; because I was running more, I was sleeping great, feeling relaxed, and watching my resting heart rate drop. My personality had even changed: The grouchiness and temper I’d considered part of my Irish-Italian DNA had ebbed so much that my wife remarked, “Hey if this comes from ultrarunning, I’ll tie your shoes for you.” I knew that aerobic exercise was a powerful antidepressant, but I hadn’t realized it could be so profoundly mood stabilizing and–I had to use the word–meditative.” (page 212)

The ideas and stories in Born to Run have inspired me to run farther and much more often. As a result, I’m feeling great, physically and emotionally and genuinely enjoying all of it.

This is my WordPress posts list. Yes, that is a lot of unpublished drafts.

I’m excited about the new iPhone, though we know so much about it already that there’s not much surprise left. I expect it will ship at the end of the month. As Jonathan pointed out this weekend, June 25th is the last Friday in June and my pick for the release date.

AT&T’s been monkeying with plans and data the past couple weeks, but the most interesting tidbit out of the Death Star was the decision to double early termination fees for smart phones. To me, that’s a defensive move. There won’t be Verizon iPhones this year, but we might see a single-chip dual-mode iPhone which would be the beginning of the end of AT&T’s hegemony in the US. Apple won’t break their contract with AT&T, they’ll just hint that it’s up to the user. After all, the iPhone is open, so the consumer is free to swap in any sim card they’ve got.

I do kind of hope Jobs has Gray Powell introduce the new iPhone. Yeah it’s a longshot, but his appearance onstage would absolutely bring the house down. A lot of Apple developers (and other decent people) were furious about what Gizmodo did to him. Jobs bringing Powell onstage would be a fantastic show of support for Apple employees. I don’t think it’ll happen, but it’s fun to think about.

BTW, Gizmodo was denied press credentials. They’re never getting into another apple event. Ever.

iPad

…gets a software update and 15 minutes talking about amazing sales numbers. Unless…

AppleTV

I think we might finally see AppleTV cease to be a hobby. The thing I’ve wanted for a long time would be the ability to “throw” a display from one device to another. We won’t get that exactly, but I think the AppleTV may be reborn as the first peripheral display accessory for the iPad/iPhone. Essentially an AppleTV connected display would be a proxy-resolution mirrored display for a touch devices. No more of that silly grey swipe-box in Apple’s current Remote.app. What is on your TV is on your iPad. Adam Lisagor described almost exactly the same thing. Plus, when media is playing, the iPad or iPhone would have access to the media’s metadata, like a live DVD extra or PiP. (thanks Jonathan)

Little Fluffy Clouds

I don’t know if we’ll see the cloud services that a lot of people are hoping for. Is the NC data center even finished? (I find that video hilarious. Either it’s a data center or a Costco.)

While I’d love to see MobileMe finally live up to its potential, it’s been eight years and not a whole lot has changed. I finally cancelled my account this past year, but I’d be happy to have reason to reactivate it. I doubt it will be free, but I wish Apple would consider a free or discounted subscription with new hardware purchases. Or throw it in with AppleCare.

If there’s going to be an iTunes subscription streaming service, I think Apple would save that sort of announcement for a late-summer special event. It would be a huge thing for students going back to school, but there’s not much to offer developers in locked down streaming media.

Computers? Oh yeah, those…

Quite a lot of Apple hardware has gone stale, especially the Mac Pro which has gone 15 months since its last revision, but also iMac and Mac Mini, both models are 8 months old. This is a complete hunch, but I suspect the Mac Pro will see a new, much smaller form factor. Also, lots of people are still waiting for a new giant Apple display.

If there are hardware announcements, the entirety of the announcement will take less than 10 minutes.

Apple’s got something up their sleeve and Jobs’ said we “won’t be disappointed.” It feels pretty exciting this year, perhaps because there wasn’t the massive rumor buildup to be letdown about. Looking forward to it.

May 1, 2013 update: I’m no longer providing a download link to the font files. Please use the googlewebfonts repository on GitHub. Just click the Zip button.

Google’s Font Directory and API for web fonts could have a transformative effect on how we read the web. The only problem is, Google has made it very difficult to download all of the actual font files.

Web designers must be free to experiment with fonts, to sketch, comp and get to know the typefaces in browser and non-browser applications. Making the fonts difficult to get or requiring special software isn’t helpful.

Pat emailed asking about the Gizmodo-iPhone imbroglio, my reply turned into this post.

Here’s the backstory, The Tale of Apple’s Next iPhone. Gizmodo’s cheekiness takes on a whole other dimension in light of where this story has gone.

1. Journalist shield laws exist to protect journalists, not to grant journalists carte blanche to break laws. Everyone knew this was shady, Jason Chen and Gizmodo are reaping what they’ve sown.
2. The story that the prototype iPhone was “found” is entirely hearsay, reported by persons with demonstrably questionable ethics.
3. If the transaction is determined to be a crime, the $5000 price tag probably made that crime a felony.
4. The police raid on Chen’s home made me really uncomfortable. It seems excessively heavy handed and REACT’s appearance of collusion with Apple shouldn’t be dismissed. (Don’t fault Apple; do fault California) I felt especially bad for Chen’s wife, whose home was invaded and whose computer was most likely also confiscated.
5. And yet, in context, this was really funny.
6. Gizmodo’s decision to publish Gray Powell’s name and photo was wrong and among the biggest jerk-moves I’ve ever seen. It served no purpose other than public humiliation. (Karma’s a bitch)
7. I will be surprised if Gizmodo ever gets press credentials to another Apple Event.
8. The guy who “found” the iPhone is a moron. Yay, $5000 and a probable criminal investigation. Well played.

View in a larger map

Gourmet House Staudt is less than 20 miles from 1 Infinite Loop, there’s a 50-50 chance the guy lived between Apple and the beer garden. If it were me — well, if it were me I would have left the phone with the bartender — but if it were me and for some reason the phone came home with me, I would have driven it to Apple HQ and returned it personally. Who knows, maybe Steve Jobs would have even offered a personal thank you for doing the right thing.

Update: Wired found him.

With Snow Leopard, Apple changed the way files are associated with applications. Previously, every file on a Mac had a hidden creator code which specified which application a file “belonged” to. Those codes date all the way back to the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984.

Files’ default applications are now globally associated based on their file extension.

To change the default application for a given file type, use the Finder to Get Info on any file with the extension you’re changing. Here’s an example of how to change all EPS documents to open in Illustrator:

In the File Info window, select your preferred application from the Open with popup menu. After selecting a new application, clicking the Change All button will make this the default application for all files with the same extension.

Why are there so few Google results for “Build Python on Shared Hosting?” Because it’s so ridiculously easy that it took me longer to write this post than it did to download, configure and compile Python 2.7 on two different shared hosting accounts.

These are the steps:

$ mkdir -p ~/opt/python-2.7
$ mkdir ~/src
$ cd ~/src
$ curl -LO http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7/Python-2.7.tgz
$ tar -xzvf Python-2.7.tgz
$ cd Python-2.7
$ ./configure --prefix=$HOME/opt/python2.7
$ make
$ make install

Next, create ~/opt/bin if it doesn’t exist already and symlink the new Python binary:

$ mkdir -p ~/opt/bin
$ ln -s ~/opt/python-2.7/bin/python2.7 ~/opt/bin/python

Finally, be sure your $SHELL’s $PATH is configured to look for binaries in ~/opt/bin. I use Bash, so I added the following line to ~/.bashrc:

export PATH=$HOME/opt/bin:$PATH

Ok, so why bother?

I’m lazy. I wanted to save myself a bunch of calls to file.close() by using the more modern with open syntax. Most shared hosts seem to consider Python unimportant, the two I use have Python 2.4.3 installed which is six years old. I couldn’t even import __future__ because __future__ hadn’t been written yet.

Waylan Limberg’s post about installing multiple versions of Python was helpful.

Update: Much has changed in a few years and Python support is finally coming around. A2 Hosting, whose shared servers run cPanel, has a page featuring Python shared hosting. Great to finally see all of this happening.