So, this one’s about the presentation I gave, titled ‘Cloud 0.1′, with a subtitle I haven’t quite nailed down yet, but which is something like ‘Why Not to Spend Lots of Time and Energy Running Your Own Infrastructure Much Worse Than Google Would, And How To Do It If You Insist’.

I’ve had the idea for a while now, but being lazy, didn’t write anything at all until the day before FUDCon, nor make any slides. Then I pitched it. To my surprise, it got enough votes to be scheduled. To my consternation, it got scheduled in the very first timeslot – so I had no time to finish my half-written notes, make any slides, do a runthrough, or generally do any of the stuff that would make it into a good talk.

Instead I got up, read my introduction, then improvised inexpertly for an hour. Many thanks to the dozen people who showed up and managed to avoid falling asleep or throwing rotten fruit.

The way I presented the talk was to spend a while talking about the many reasons it’s not a good idea to run your own infrastructure and the few reasons it is, then spend quite a while giving a 10,000 foot overview of how to set up a mail and web server, then spend the last 15 minutes briefly going over some rather neat webapps I run on my servers, and IRC/IM proxying. However, in hindsight, I think the most valuable bits are the consideration of whether you should run your own infrastructure, and the notes on neat, not-necessarily-well-known webapps and so on you can use if you do. The mailserver / webserver stuff is just too complex for a one hour presentation. So, since my notes are terrible, personal shorthand gibberish, and I have no slides, instead of giving you those, I’ll write a post about the same topics. Deal?

When I talk about ‘infrastructure’ I’m talking about the services that support your computing. The classic, old-school example is running your own mail server; other bits that come into the talk are a personal web server and IRC / IM proxying servers.

In the past it was pretty hard to find managed ways of doing any of those things, and it was fairly common for geeky types with personal internet connections to DIY. If you look at the internet, of, say, 1995, it was kind of designed as a giant interoperable network of nodes which would provide these kind of services to a group of users, and geeky types would essentially act as a node unto themselves – they were a service provider of one, providing services to themselves, and maybe a few friends and family, instead of relying on mail and web hosting services provided by their ISPs, which were inevitably crappy and limited.

These days it’s much less common, for a good reason: you can almost always get someone else to do it for you, much cheaper and better than you would do it yourself.

This forms the ‘why you probably shouldn’t do this’ side of the argument. There is just about nothing you can achieve by hosting your own mailserver which Google won’t do much better in exchange for sending you some ads and assimilating your personal information into the future Skynet, or which a service like Fastmail won’t do much better in exchange for a frankly pretty small cost – a cost which will almost certainly be less than the value of the time and money you’ll invest into doing it yourself. This is not surprising. There are huge, huge economies of scale built into infrastructure provision. Doing it for a user base of 1-5, on a hobbyist basis, is unsurprisingly vastly less efficient than doing it for ten million people on a very very professional basis.

The other disadvantages to self-hosting really just derive from this fact. You will almost certainly screw up more than a hosted provider will: you will break the server by deploying some dodgy app or an untested update. You will have less capacity (wave goodbye to your self-hosted blog when you get slashdotted, for e.g.) You will almost certainly have less redundancy – I know I don’t have any kind of failover on this webserver. You will almost certainly fail to take adequate backups. All these are boring, menial things which any decent hosted provider will do better just because it’s part of doing a professional job. You won’t because you’re doing this for fun, and those things are not fun.

Briefly, paid or ‘free’ (ad-supported / personal data supported) hosting services can provide you with almost anything you can host yourself, and do it much more efficiently. So why would you ever want to do it yourself? There are only a few reasons:

Necessity. I’m sticking this up at the top to make sure you don’t miss one of the best bits of this lengthy post. There are some things you can self-host that, to the best of my knowledge, you can’t actually get from a paid provider. The thing I know about is IRC/IM proxying. There’s no hosted provider of this that I know of. There’s a bit of this post down the bottom which explains what this is and, briefly, how to do it. If you’re a heavy user of IRC and/or IM you may well want to do it, because it’s really useful. So if you skip a lot of this post, do read that bit.

Education. You can learn quite a lot about how the internet (still, more or less) works by doing this stuff yourself. It will certainly teach you things. The internet is a somewhat different beast in practice these days, with so much of it existing inside Google’s and Facebook’s monstrously internally complex domains, but at a certain level it still works _more or less_ how the RFCs of the Internet Past declare it works, and running your own services will teach quite a lot about that.

Control. Obviously, the higher the level of functionality that you outsource, the less control you have over the implementation. This seems like a really big reason, but it often isn’t. When it comes to mail, a hosted mail provider will almost always provide everything you want. You just don’t need really fine grained control over the server configuration. You do not need to control the maximum simultaneous connection count to the IMAP server. You want a service that delivers your mail, allows you to send mail, allows you to organize your mail, and filters spam out for you. That’s really pretty much it. Gmail certainly achieves all these things. So do dozens of other services. Again, when it comes to web hosting, often what you want is a WordPress instance. You do not need deep control over the server’s PHP configuration. It’s more likely to irritate you than help you. There are cases where you actually need such control, as opposed to just maybe finding it cool that you have it, but those cases are fairly uncommon.

Fun. Yeah, it’s worth mentioning this. Some of us have very strange mindsets which find battling obscure MTA configuration to be an interesting way to spend our time. I’ve checked with medical professionals, and this is an incurable condition. Sorry. We just have to live with it. If you’re a fellow sufferer, you may self-host for no reason other than that you enjoy doing it.

Privacy. This is probably the largest remaining really valid reason. If you use a ‘free’ service for your infrastructure, you should always keep in mind that you almost certainly no longer own your stuff in any practical sense. If you use Gmail, Google pretty much owns your email. You don’t. They can look at it, use it to develop Skynet, send it to the government, and just generally do whatever the hell they like with it. In strict point of fact this is not entirely true – there are some legal restraints on what they can do with ‘your’ data – but I find it’s an excellent rule of thumb to work from. When dealing with such services I find it pays more or less to assume that everything you put into them will immediately be forwarded to the police and all your worst enemies, and then used to generate large amounts of advertising that will be mailed to you. Doing so avoids you being shocked in future when some of those things actually happen.

Paid services are a somewhat different ball of wax, in that you are not offering up your data in exchange for some services, but actually paying for the services. You therefore have a reasonable expectation that you will retain most of the ownership of your data. If you use a decent service provider, the contract you have with them may even possibly bear this out. However, there are still several problems, mostly legal ones. Your hoster can almost certainly be obliged to nuke your services and probably turn over your data to law enforcement under the terms of various bits of legislation, depending on where you are and where they are. Even if they’re not obliged to, they may well do so if asked by a sufficiently powerful body (like the government, or Universal Studios), on the basis that pissing you off is probably less damaging to them than pissing off the government. If you host your own services, this becomes much more unlikely.

It remains only to point out that, in brutal point of fact, this is often unlikely to be a consideration, but it is still worth bearing in mind, and though it’s not a huge issue for me, I do still value the fact that it’d be quite difficult for anyone to kill or forcibly access my mail or private web content.

In relation to this last point, it’s worth remembering that ‘self-hosting’ vs ‘using a provider’ is more of a spectrum than a binary state. Even those of us who ‘self-host’ are inevitably going to be outsourcing some stuff to someone. I use No-IP for DNS registration, for instance, so in theory someone could at least knock happyassassin.net offline by leaning on No-IP. I don’t have control over that level of things. But still, No-IP doesn’t own or even have access to any of my actual data, only my DNS records.

At the general level, even if you decide you want to ‘self-host’, you have a lot of flexibility in terms of what level you want to control yourself and what you want to pay someone else to look after for you. You don’t have to actually buy physical hardware and host everything off an internet connection you personally control. If that’s at, or near, the extreme ‘self-hosting’ end of the spectrum, then moving towards ‘completely managed’, we have:

* Stick your own hardware in a co-lo (i.e. you outsource the physical internet connection)
* Use a service like Slicehost where you get full root access to a bare virtual server (i.e. you outsource the physical connection and the ‘hardware’ provision)
* Use a service which gives you access somewhere higher up the stack

Everything else is a variant on that last one. It really only matters what level you get access at. Maybe you get a pre-set web server instance in which you can run whatever webapps you want. So-called ‘PaaS clouds’, like Openshift, are really just this kind of managed hosting, in a way; ‘IaaS clouds’ are pretty much like Slicehost. Maybe you just get a managed instance of some specific app or service, like WordPress (or ‘email’). It comes down to how much control and privacy you need, with the trade-off for more control and privacy usally being more expense and complexity.

So, there’s the theoretical for-and-against of self-hosting. It comes down to the broad conclusion that you probably don’t want to do it, and even if you do, you’re probably better off going for something in the middle of the spectrum – Slicehost, or one of the new public clouds, or something like that – than really doing (almost) everything yourself.

Assuming you self-host, or are going to start trying, despite all the above: here’s some notes on actually doing it.

Domain

Getting a domain of your own is pretty much the Point 0 of self-hosting. It’s also, fortunately, pretty simple. You can find a lot of confusing information on the topic but essentially it boils down to: buy a domain name and then set up the information that says ‘this domain is associated with this IP address’ – DNS records. It is much simpler to do these two things together, through one service. I use No-IP – their prices are reasonable and I’ve had no problem with their service. There are many other providers. It’s really as simple as picking a domain – like my happyassassin.net – paying your fee, and then filling out a little form which says ‘www.happyassassin.net should point to IP address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, mail.happyassassin.net should point to IP address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx’, and so on. If you’re going to host mail for your domain, you’d also need an MX record, which says ‘mail for any address at happyassassin.net goes to IP address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx’. And that’s really pretty much it. If you’re really self-hosting, as in you own the machines and they’re hanging off your own internet connection, all those IP addresses should be your own IP address. You’re going to want a static IP, for that.

Mail

Mail is the most complex thing to self-host and probably the least sensible, as hosted mail providers really do have it all figured out. I’m not going to turn this into a comprehensive ‘how to host your own mail’ walkthrough, because there are many of those already, and if you’re going to do it, what you should do is get a hold of a good guide and follow it carefully. But I do have one thing to contribute. I find it helps to bear in mind there are broadly three functions of a mail server, at least in my mental model, and you can pretty much treat them separately:

1: Retrieve messages from your existing mail accounts and serve them back out via IMAP for you to read on your client machines

I do this using fetchmail to actually retrieve the mail, procmail to sort it into folders and spam-test it via spamassassin, and dovecot to serve it back out via IMAP. I would strongly recommend the use of dovecot, it really is the best IMAP server around. It’s efficient, actively developed, highly standard-compliant, and supports things like IDLE very well. Other IMAP servers generally fail at at least one of those things. The retrieving and serving out are kind of different functions, but it makes no sense to do one without the other, really. There’s no point aggregating the mail from your various accounts in one place without also setting up a convenient interface – i.e. a server – for you to access it with.

2: Act as an SMTP server for your outgoing mail

When you want to send mail you send it through an SMTP server, right. Most people know that. Running your own SMTP server, for your personal use, has the advantage that you don’t have to keep changing to an SMTP server that’s accessible from the network you’re currently on. (Though, of course, if you just use Gmail, you can send outgoing mail from anything…)

3: Accept incoming mail from anyone to mail addresses at a domain you own

This is the most complicated case, probably. The fact that I’m set up to do this is why you can mail me at happyassassin.net, my own domain. When you send a mail there, your mail provider sees that mail to happyassassin.net is supposed to go to an IP address I own, and sends it there. That IP address actually is my own IP address, and connections to port 25 on that IP address are forwarded by my router to my mail server, which accepts the mail and sticks it into my mail folders just like fetchmail/procmail do for the email addresses I don’t administer myself.

I’m not going to explain in detail how to achieve all the above, but the key point is to remember these functions are distinct – you can do any one of them without doing the others. Where it’s easy to get confused is that you usually would use the same application, the same process, to do functions 2 and 3. I use postfix, because it’s marginally less insane than sendmail. But it’s best to think of them as two separate operations, and do one and then the other. If you think in terms of ‘how do I set up postfix’, you’re likely to get confused – finding guides for function 3 when what you really wanted was function 2. I know I did.

Another little note on that topic: the sketch of happyassassin.net mail I gave is, strictly speaking, incorrect. Your mail provider doesn’t really see that mail for happyassassin.net should go to my IP address: it sees that mail for happyassassin.net should go to No-IP. Why? Well, because I host my servers off my home internet connection, and that has port 25 blocked. Most home internet connections do. The way email actually works, mail for a domain is always initially delivered on port 25. The DNS record which says ‘mail for happyassassin.net goes to IP XXX’ cannot say ‘IP XXX on port 26′. It just says ‘IP XXX’. The port is hard-coded in the standards. So if you have a connection on which port 25 is blocked, you really can’t be the server that initially receives mail for your own domain. No-IP provide a neat service to get around this, called mail reflector. Essentially you set up your DNS records so that mail for your domain goes to No-IP’s server, and you tell No-IP the actual port of your server. Then No-IP’s server simply forwards mail straight through to your server. They don’t store it or have any access to it, except in the case that your server is down – they will keep it on theirs until your server comes back up, then forward it on. It’s a neat way around the port 25 problem, which costs $40 a year – at which price you could instead have fastmail handle your entire mail setup, including your own domain’s mail. Again, like I said, self-hosting is almost never actually economically sensible.

Web

Setting up a web server, at the 10,000 feet scale, isn’t very difficult. Basically, you do ‘yum install httpd’ (or equivalent), and you’re done. You already registered www.mydomain.com and pointed it to your server’s IP address. Now you set your router to forward traffic on port 80 to the appropriate box, and you’re done. People going to www.mydomain.com will see a ‘hello world!’ post that’s the default homepage for Apache. Oh, and you do want to use Apache. There are alternatives, but they’re rarely what you want for self-hosting, and you will find much more help with configuring Apache than configuring anything else.

These days, you’re likely not going to be faffing around creating static content and dumping it in /var/www/html on your server. You really want to run webapps – you probably want to run a WordPress blog, for instance. Essentially your web server is providing useful services for you.

The 10,000 foot overview of how to install web apps is similarly simple: yum them. The most common ones are packaged. WordPress is: you can just do ‘yum install wordpress’. There are guides for the finicky bits of configuration.

There’s one stumbling block you’ll hit for most webapps, so I’ll mention it quickly: they almost all need a database. Web apps rarely store things as files on your local disk, because that’s silly. They want access to an SQL database instead, and they’ll store their configuration, your blog posts, and whatever else in there. You almost certainly want to use MySQL for this. MySQL will be packaged in any sane distro. Once you install it, it will probably be configured with no root password and a guest account. You will want to set a root password and destroy the guest account. There are guides to how to do this in the excellent MySQL documentation. Then, for each webapp you install, you’ll likely create a new database specially for that webapp, with a user account specially for that webapp which has access to the database. You can do this with a single one line command. The webapp will ask for a MySQL username and password as part of its setup process; feed it the username you created especially for it. That way, no webapp can access another’s data; only root will have access to all the databases, and you should only use the root account for any manual poking of the database you personally have to do. Never give the root password to any webapp (or any other person). The most popular webapps, like WordPress, tend to have the MySQL setup well documented, and you can apply the documentation to any other webapp which just needs a simple MySQL config to work. Which is most of them.

That’s web serving. Here are some of the webapps I run on my server. You may not have known about some, and find ‘em useful.

WordPress. Well, everyone knows about WordPress. It’s a blogging platform. If you want to have a blog on your server, you’re probably going to want to run WordPress. It’s well documented, easy to set up, hugely popular (and hence well supported), does everything you need from a blog, and has a bewildering array of plugins. Of course, if all you want is to have a blog, it’s almost certainly a better idea just to get it hosted by wordpress.com than faff around with setting up your own web server.

Roundcubemail. This is a webmail front end. Combined with my mailserver, it’s the last puzzle piece in extremely painfully replicating the functionality of Gmail – it gives me a pretty snazzy web front end to my mail, for the rare cases where I’m on someone else’s system and don’t want to set up an IMAP client, or something. It also came in quite handy at one FUDCon when the port blocking was so tight that IMAP clients didn’t actually work. Roundcube is a very very good webmail app, it has all the functionality of a desktop mail client, is pretty fast, and has a very snazzy interface. The old-school choice, Squirrelmail, is about as functional but nowhere near as pretty.

tt-rss is a news reader webapp. Running it is like hosting your own Google Reader, essentially. It’s a lot nicer than just running separate news reader clients on each of your client machines, because it means your read/unread state is always in sync. But of course, you could always just…use Google Reader. It’s not like knowledge of what RSS feeds you like is likely to be astonishingly private information.

MyTinyToDo is a very simple todo list webapp. I tried for years to find a big stonking egroupware suite – contacts, calendaring, and tasks, essentially – which would cover those things and sync well with my desktop clients and my phone. I never quite did. But mytinytodo handles one piece of the equation – tasks – just fine. I haven’t bothered trying to sync it with desktop clients / phone because you can just use the web interface very easily on any of those devices, it renders nicely on phones. Of course, you could always just use a hosted service like Remember The Milk.

OwnCloud is a ‘personal cloud’ server, or to avoid the buzzwordiness, it’s basically just a file server webapp. You point it at a place where files live and it makes them available through a web frontend and also via WebDAV (which lets you mount them as a shared drive on most OSes). It pretty much just does that, but it does it quite well and easily. At FUDCon, Jeroen gave me a long list of things that are wrong with it, and Jeroen is massively smarter than me so I’m sure he’s right, but all I know is it does what I ask it to. It’s handy for, say, storing your (encrypted!) password database, or a document you want accessible from anywhere. I store a lot of my notes in it. Your hosted equivalent would be, say, Dropbox.

Finally (man, 4000 words? Anyone still awake?) we come to the one thing I host myself, find useful, and could not find a hosted-provider equivalent of: IRC and IM proxying.

This achieves for IRC and IM what using a mail server achieves for mail, or using a web feed reader achives for news: you can use many clients without them conflicting, and with the state preserved between them. How it works is essentially that you run an app which acts as both an IRC client and an IRC server. It connects to all your IRC servers, and then on your client machines, instead of connecting directly to Freenode or EFnet, you connect to the proxy, which also acts as an IRC server. It then forwards all the traffic to you.

What does this get you? Well, you can sign in from six different clients at once – and instead of each looking to the rest of the world like a separate user, they all act as ‘you’. You can have part of a conversation from your laptop, part from your phone, and part from your desktop, and the outside world won’t know the difference.

Also, as the proxy’s always logged in, you can disconnect all your client machines, and the proxy will keep storing conversations, including any private messages. Then the next time you connect a client, you’ll get a log of all the channel traffic that happened while you were away, and any PMs you got sent will show up. It’s very handy.

Finally it’ll give you a handy central store of logs. It’s just a much better way to IRC.

I use Bip as an IRC proxy. It’s very easy to set up – really, you just install it and give it a list of IRC networks and channels you use, and tell it your nickname. Then you run it, and set up your IRC clients to connect to it, not directly to the networks. And you’re done. It’s probably the easiest thing you can self-host, as well as being the most useful.

On the same machine I run Bitlbee, which is an IM proxy – it connects out to MSN, Jabber, ICQ, AIM and so on, and also acts as an IRC server, effectively turning IM traffic into IRC traffic. I then have Bip use my Bitlbee server, so when I’m using MSN, my desktop is connected to my Bip instance, which is connected to my Bitlbee instance, which is connected to MSN. Fun, huh? Bitlbee can also actually connect to Twitter and Identi.ca, effectively turning your ‘social network’ traffic into IRC. You can tweet just by typing a message into your IRC client, and tweets from people you follow pop up as IRC messages. It’s a fun interface if you’re used to using IRC.

So…that’s my self-hosting story. Why you probably shouldn’t do it, and some things you might want to run if you do. Hope it’s helpful!

However, in the last few days, Google seems to have killed this service. Instead of giving me a pretty nice ‘mobile’ version of Google Maps, visiting the URL on my N900 instead just gives me the full desktop Maps page, which is very slow to load and use on an N900, and much more of a pain to navigate with all the space that’s basically ‘wasted’ on a small cellphone screen.

Google, can you please restore the old behaviour here, and give N9 and N900 users our workable Google Maps back?

I wonder how many guides to getting started in open source (whatever) include the single most important instruction I’ve ever come across, which applies to just about any action you can take in a F/OSS project?

#0: Look and see how other people do it

Want to learn to write a git commit message? Well, you can read Danni’s awesome post, but what did you do before it was there? Go find some git commit messages by established developers – ideally, the other contributors to the project you want to commit to – and see what they look like. Figure out the structure, and copy it.

This applies to _everything_. It’s almost always easier, and usually will give you a better result, to copy what everyone else does instead of trying to figure it out from first principles. Don’t stand out from the crowd! Don’t innovate! Don’t think outside the box! Don’t blaze your own trail! Copy shamelessly!

I exaggerate, of course, but remember, even the most incredible innovators are coming up with amazing new stuff 0.01% of the time, and writing git commit messages 99.99% of the time. And you really don’t want to invite an amazing new way of writing git commit messages every time you write one.

“But I’ll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network.”

Oh, owch.

Since then, though, I’ve been reading all the responses to the news, and now I find I feel a large sense of frustration at the way his life has been interpreted in many quarters.

I read a particularly galling article just now in one of my least favourite papers, the Globe & Mail, ostensibly directed at the Occupy Wall Street protesters but really directed at the sense of self-satisfaction of its readers, which crystallized everything that to me seems wrong about much of the reaction to Jobs’ death.

The G&M’s theory is that everything Jobs achieved, he owed to Wall Street; that all his great achievements could never have happened without the modern American capitalist system embodied by Wall Street. No Wall Street, no Jobs, no Apple.

I think it’s interesting to look at this claim in the context of the four, to me, most significant phases of Jobs’ career Apple Phase I, NExT, Pixar, and Apple Phase II.

I’d say that all of Jobs’ most significant achievements came in the first three of these. Apple Phase I was a true early Silicon Valley company: it was not driven by conventional capitalism at all, it was driven by a couple of kids with an innate interest in early personal computer hardware screwing around in a garage. It doesn’t seem to have been motivated by any kind of desire to build a world-straddling corporate behemoth; it was motivated by a desire to build cool machines that did interesting stuff. And that’s what Apple I built: cool computers with which people did deeply interesting stuff. They learned to program, they improved the efficiency of all kinds of processes in all kinds of worlds – big business, yes, but academia and small business and the home and all the other sectors of human activity. Early Apple computers, like all other early personal computers, were fundamentally rough-and-ready, open, learning environments. You poked around and figured out how stuff worked. You traded ideas with friends. You thought of new ways to do things. A couple of Apple ][s were part of the whole menagerie of computers my family had at home when I was young, on which my Dad, myself and my sisters played - not just in the sense of 'playing games' but in the sense of 'playing around', which is a much more interesting and useful one.

NExT was very similar to Apple Phase I: it was still fundamentally a company made up of the kinds of people who screwed around with Apple ][s when they were kids. It built interesting and hackable computers and software with which people in all the same sectors did equally interesting and productive stuff. As everyone involved had grown up a bit and there was more money sloshing around in the industry it looked more like a conventional corporation than did Apple Phase 1, but it was still at heart a geeks' company, like Apple or the early HP or many other such companies. Geeks will be geeks, whether they're being paid for it or not. Money might help them do things a bit faster, and few geeks say no to large quantities of it, but it's not the point.

Pixar is one of the most old-fashioned businesses in the world: it’s a company of actors and writers. They tell stories, just as people have told stories for years and years. Since Disney bought the company the money side has come into play with crass cash-ins like Cars 2, but all the really great Pixar films are fundamentally combinations of great technology with great stories: that’s why they’re great, that’s why we love and remember them. People have been writing, remembering and telling each other great stories since before we had any kind of economy at all, never mind a post-Enlightenment capitalist one. It’s hard to believe the great stories that the wonderfully talented storytellers at Pixar have produced would not have been told, loved, and remembered in some form or another no matter when, where or under what kind of economic systems those storytellers had been born.

Which brings us to Apple Phase 2. Finally we have a part of Jobs’ career which, as the G&M argued, could likely not have happened without modern capitalism. The current incarnation of Apple is not an engineers’ company like old Apple was. It’s not really driven by a desire to do cool and interesting things with personal computers. It’s driven by a simple desire to make an awful lot of money, to be the world-striding corporate behemoth Apple Phase 1 never was. It’s very good at that.

What does Apple Phase 2 produce? It produces, essentially, fripperies. Polished, shiny, well-designed, addictive, yet ultimately superfluous toys. Apple’s personal computer side is no longer the heart of the business, and no longer aims so hard at the tinkerers or creative people it used to. (It’s still hanging on to a lot of those people because the competition is so poor and Apple’s legacy is so strong, but I doubt anyone could argue it’s at the heart of what Apple does any more). The heart of Apple’s business is now consumer electronics, and despite the vaguely aspirational nature of its advertising, those consumer electronics are fundamentally toys. They are dedicated to no higher goal than to allow us to pass dead time elegantly. The iPhone works as a phone, sure, but then so do any number of other products made since the 1980s. If the iPhone hadn’t existed our practical ability to communicate with each other wouldn’t be affected one whit. What people really do with their iPhones, iPods and iPads is to play – and not in the sense of playing around, really, but just playing.

There’s nothing wrong with unproductive play. All of us do it at some time or another. No-one can be ‘on’ all day every day; we get fatigued and just want to sit down and do something relaxing for a bit. But the key point here is that the forms of unproductive play just really don’t matter all that much. Given the choice between listening to some music on an iPod when you’ve got ten minutes to wait for a bus and no-one else is around and just sitting there staring at a bush, you’ll probably go for the iPod, sure. But people have been sitting around waiting for things to happen for millennia, and we’ve always come up with some way to distract ourselves; from reading a book to whistling to adding up numbers in our heads. It’s just not important. No-one is going to look back on their life and see the ten minutes they spent listening to Lady Gaga while they waited for the number 52 to Darlington as a transcendent moment in their life. It was just dead time that they filled.

I don’t think there’s anything terribly evil about the products Apple Phase 2 makes, specifically. If there’s any evil to them at all it’s a symptom not a cause: a symptom of societies that are probably tilted somewhat too far towards making and buying utterly unnecessary fripperies. It’s not worth getting all hot under the collar about how closed down and un-hackable modern Apple hardware is, but it is worth noting those attributes: they’re simply a consequence of the purpose of modern Apple hardware, which is not for you to learn how electronics work or learn how to write programs or come up with interesting new ways of doing things (or even interesting new things), but simply for you to play around. They’re toys. No-one ever got hot under the collar because their Barbie Doll wasn’t fully user-serviceable; it’s a toy. If you want a toy, by all means, buy one. If you don’t want a toy, buy something else. (Again, Apple computers are still quite usable as computers, and I understand those who find Apple computers meet their practical computing needs, but throughout Apple Phase 2, they’ve only ever gone in a more toy-like direction, never back the other way.)

So really, the only phase of Jobs’ career to which modern capitalism was essential was the last and most superficial one. All the truly significant things Jobs did and achieved were not essentially dependent on the capitalist economy at all. They existed within it; certain good features of capitalism may have contributed to their development. But they were all manifestations of things that have happened for millennia, under any conceivable economic system. If the iPhone and iPod and iPad were erased from history tomorrow, maybe we’d all use slightly clunkier cellphones, and use them a bit less. But would human experience be fundamentally altered? No. If Apple Phase 1 and NExT hadn’t existed, or rather if the whole early and middle Silicon Valley scenes of which it was a fundamental part hadn’t existed, the worlds of computing and even science might be noticeably retarded in development in comparison to where they really are. If Pixar hadn’t existed, the beautiful stories it told might have been lost to millions of people; the inspiring and uplifting effects of great stories are significant forces in peoples lives, things you remember to the end. Toys, usually, are not.

I’m not anti-capitalist in particular. I suspect it may be to economic systems what Churchill described democracy as being to political systems – the worst choice apart from all the others. But it does frustrate me to see unthinking or even cynical capitalism-worship, this idea that the greatest thing Steve Jobs ever did was build some shiny toys that made some modern-day Apple shareholders very rich. It was not.

(The other thing that annoys me about much of the response to Jobs’ passing is the way it contributes to the largely mythical concept of individual exceptionalism, but I’m sure I’ll get to that another time. :>)

I also took the opportunity to move from courier to dovecot, which seems to be generally better-maintained and have quite a few capabilities courier does not. The conversion went remarkably smoothly, partly thanks to the great documentation and tools on the dovecot site, and it sure seems to be super fast so far. No problems noted as of yet – fingers crossed! But if I don’t seem to be replying to your emails, ping me on IRC and sound the alarm…