Today, Panic released their first new major app in a long time. Named Coda, it's a tool for serious web developers who want an Xcode-like tool for web development. It integrates a lot of tools into one app, which is a very nice thing. Unfortunately for me, Coda's still missing a lot of what I need to make extensive use out of it, or enough to justify the $80 price tag. I'd like to point out the big 5 that are missing from Coda's arsenal that would really make the app significantly more useful.

5. Make Coda Foxy!

"When we write Cocoa software, we don't do it in ten different applications. We do it in Xcode, because it brings all the tools we need together in one place. We saw a clear need, and we set out to fill it." - Steven Frank, Co-Founder of Panic

This one is not a terribly big deal because Firefox is a bit of a behemoth, and the integration might not be possible because of how extensive the WebKit framework is. But dammit, I've got a soapbox and I'm going to use it. I would love to see Firefox (or rather the Gecko rendering engine) get built into Coda. The ability to look at the major differences between the two biggest Mac web rendering engines in real time would be an excellent experience. The extra heft of the application could be justified by the fact that Coda is an app for professionals.

4. Plug it in, plug it in!

Plugins rock. Load only the functionality that you, the user, wants in the app. IDEs are especially great places for a plugin-based architecture. And with a usable API, the community can pick up where Panic leaves off. This way, you can include the Python and Ruby on Rails guys more easily. It would also be an excellent way to implement many of the critiques on this list.

3. Spacing out

This one goes out to you too, CSSEdit. Firebug makes it easy to visualize the effects of changing CSS properties like margin and padding. With a powerful visual design tool, working on CSS positioning could be made drastically simpler to understand. Coda's got plenty of whitespace in the visual CSS editor (which looks suspiciously similar to CSSEdit's) to handle something like that, but it could really go anywhere.

2. "You can't set breakpoints?!"

The Internet is becoming more and more a sophisticated application platform, due to Javascript handling updating the GUI and querying the server. As the GUIs I want to implement become more and more complicated (and believe it or not, Javascript can do some pretty crazy things), it becomes crucial to have a fast and powerful tool to do JavaScript debugging. Something comparable to Xcode would be nice.

1. I got my fist, I got my plan, I've got Subversionism!

Just like any other project, I need to put my files into Subversion. Unfortunately, I'm also lazy and don't do it if I have to duck down to command line (even though I'm a CLI junkie; if I'm in the zone, don't pull me out). Having super-tight integration with Subversion is a must. Checking in and out, reading logs, doing diffs, all of it.

And no, the Terminal doesn't cut it.

If you don't understand the title of this post, don't bother reading any further. If you do, here's a nice regular expression that will, given an Obj-C source file (.h or .m), give you all of the method signatures. It should work in every case that I can think of, but if you're doing anything involving weird types or preprocessor macros it should work.

iTunes was released on January 9, 2001, at Macworld San Francisco. It was a huge deal at the time. Like, really huge. The big deal Mac MP3 players at the time, well, sucked as music jukeboxes. They were just that - MP3 players. that left the organization up to the end user. So when iTunes came out and replaced SoundJam MP, it was not only revolutionary, but extremely welcome to those of us with large music collections.

However, iTunes 1.0 was more than just a rebranded SoundJam. It had a completely reworked UI. Gone were the completely horrific looking skins that accompanied it. It was a music jukebox, just like it had been advertised. And Apple made it dead easy to rip, mix, and burn. Suffice it to say, iTunes 1.0 was a pretty amazing app. But Apple didn't stop there.

Apple kept chugging along. iTunes 1.1 came out the next month, with support for external burners. But iTunes 2 brought along a ton of new stuff, like an equalizer, iPod support, and crossfading among other things. And yet, the entire interface from iTunes 1 to iTunes 2 saw almost no change - one buton was added to the main window.

And at this point, Apple could do no wrong. iTunes was maturing and getting better and better, and everyone from music enthusiasts to bloggers to Mac news writers to New York Times journalists was loving it. And when iTunes 3 came out in July 2002, with smart playlists, play counts, sound check, and tons of new stuff, it got acclaim and praise from everyone who looked at it.

"The way Apple graphically presents your music collection in the iTunes UI is inherently logical, and this simplicity eludes the competition. I highly recommend iTunes 3." - Paul Thurrott

And Apple was on top. Apple had the best music jukebox in the world, smoking anything on the Mac and definitely annihilating anything you could ever find on Windows. Apple was on top, which allowed them to plow forward on Steve Jobs' next big thing, the iTunes Music Store.

April 28, 2003. The day iTunes 4 was released. The day the iTunes Music Store was launched. Taking a look at the UI, Apple added a single button to the window. But, they also added the "Music Store" button as a permanent fixture to the Source list on the side. The general trend for the interface at this point seems to be "more is better". But iTunes 4 was still praised as being amazing and revolutionary.

Apple, however, decided to milk iTunes 4 for all they could. Looking at the timeline:

• 4.0: April 28, 2003
• 4.1: October 16, 2003
• 4.2: December 18, 2003
• 4.5: April 28, 2004
• 4.6: June 9, 2004
• 4.7: October 27, 2004
• 4.8: May 9, 2005
• 4.9: June 28, 2005
• 5.0: September 7, 2005
• 6.0: October 12, 2005
• 7.0: September 12, 2006

Some interesting things to notice from that list:

• There were 8 4.x releases, and 0 similarly versioned releases for 5, 6, or 7 (so far).
• iTunes 4.x was available for almost 2 and a half years. iTunes 5.x was available for a month.
• The biggest gap was from iTunes 6 to iTunes 7, a gap of 11 months that was filled with only bug fixes and Nike+iPod support.
• Much of the updates during the iTunes 4 era were adding more and more support and fixes for the iTunes Music Store. Such as adding international stores, iMixes, iTunes gift cards, AOL accounts, etc.
• Apple at this point was very aggressive in marketing iTunes as a music solution, and not just a music organizer with a store attached to it. This explains both the success of iTunes and the direction Apple is and has been heading with iTunes since the advent of the Music Store.

So Apple chugged away for two and a half years on iTunes 4.x, forcing more and more stuff into it. All those things like Party Shuffle and the Music Store quick links kept overcomplicating the UI more and more. So, in typical Apple fashion, rather than fix it, they just glossed over everything and prettied it up.

iTunes 5 brought with it a completely new window. Gone was the brushed metal that was a signature style of the app (and no doubt copied by dozens if not hundreds of Mac apps over its history), and in was this new style which had this smooth light-grey-to-dark-grey gradient on the top and bottom of the window. It was more compact, but compactness comes with a cost - the comforting whitespace that iTunes had had since it had launched. Also, the Source list was becoming more and more crowded, as Party Shuffle and Podcasts had been added to the list (although they had been added in iTunes 4.5 and 4.9 respectively). It felt more like iTunes 4.10 than iTunes 5.

iTunes 6 was released one whole month later, for reasons known only to those inside Apple who come up with the arbitrary version numbers for these things. This, like iTunes 5, really felt more like iTunes 4.11. All iTunes 6 added was the ability to buy video through the music store. It also added a "Videos" item to the Source list, further complicating the sidebar. People were starting to get a little hesitant by now to blindly praise iTunes, as it was starting to suffer from feature bloat and performance hits.

A year after iTunes 6 came out, Apple released iTunes 7. This brought some much needed organization to the sidebar, and added some new ways of looking at your music, but again at the cost of simplicity. iTunes 7 also did a full 360 and redesigned nearly every single control, for reasons completely unknown to the world. Even things like scroll bars were graphically changed.

What happened to iTunes? It went from being an extremely simple and easy to use music player and organizer and became this amalgamation of a music and video player with a complicated interface that seems to embrace just adding more and more. Where did they go wrong?

Quite honestly, the answer lies within the iTunes Store. iTunes 4 marked the beginning of the end, mostly because it saw a shift in how Apple saw iTunes progressing. It no longer became about making it easy for you to organize your music; the priority suddenly became all about making it easy for you to buy your content through iTunes. And that's where Apple lost its focus.

So what can be done about this situation? We, as iTunes users and iTunes customers, can yell to Apple, but that is probably not going to yield too much of an effect. Perhaps some young and enterprising software developer could effectively rewrite iTunes (say, iTunes 3), and perhaps even rely on iTunes to handle the organization and storage of new content while just acting as a player for the existing iTunes database. What Apple needs to do, first and foremost, is to go back to the drawing board with iTunes, and redesign the interface from scratch. A lot of the metaphors that came with iTunes should stay, such as having the Source list on the left and the music list on the right. But many of the new things should be redesigned or, quite frankly, designed out.

If only it would happen.

Edit: All of the images and most of the research that was done from this post came from a few pages from Wikipedia. And they seemed pretty accurate based on what I remember of the history of iTunes. The page for iTunes, and iTunes' version history from Wikipedia.

Microsoft's Zune. I swore to give the Zune an honest look when it actually began materializing on the Internet. I wouldn't be a Mac zealot for the sake of being a Mac zealot - I'd actually give it a fair and honest run through. Well, as it came out a couple days ago, a couple of my friends decided to each get a Zune at launch. Naturally, I got my grubby hands on it, and gave it a ten minute run-through.

I'm not impressed, but I am a bit worried. More after the jump.

The first thing you notice when you see a Zune is that it is ridiculously boxy. Moreso than the pictures convey. Moreso than the original first-generation iPod. Picking it up only enhances the boxiness. However, when you pick it up, you find out another serious design flaw - it feels like it's made with cheap plastic. There's no way to tell if you need to 'break it in' or anything like that, but regardless, the surface is not nearly as smooth as any of the sides of the iPod. As you'll notice more in the remainder of the article, I'm going to compare the hell out of the Zune and the iPod, because, well, the Zune is supposed to be Microsoft's iPod killer. It's only fair.

I was told that in order to turn the Zune on, you had to hold the play button down for two seconds. I don't know if that's the only way to do it, and it's definitely not significant enough to be a showstopper, but the iPod does it so much nicer, where you just push any button and it turns on immediately. Now, with the Zune on, I can start looking for something to listen to.

The actual UI is not terrible. And I wasn't really expecting it to be, seeing as the Zune project is the child of J Allard, the guy in charge of the Xbox 360 project. The Xbox 360 UI dealt with "blades", which is a fancy way of saying tabs. The Zune UI is quite similar to that of the iPod, with the main difference being the useless, battery-wasting eye candy all over the place.

That's about all I got to test. However, I will say that the headphones are really, really hard to unplug from the Zune.

Now for my long-winded opinion section. First, I'd like to address the form factor. It's over a quarter taller and almost twice as thick as Apple's 30 GB iPod. It's even slightly heavier than the iPod. It's made with this cheap- and plastic-feeling material. The point I'm trying to make is that the form factor is unwieldy at best. It just doesn't feel good. The iPod, however, does. That is a point that should be emphasized, because its one of those things that really makes you enjoy using the device. And the size is a lot more significant than the weight, because Microsoft has to justify to its customers that the Zune deserves a place in their pocket, along side the cell phones, PDAs, cameras, and wallets.

Another issue I saw was with the buttons. They're a little on the small side. This wouldn't really be an issue if the only time you ever interact with the Zune is when you've got it in front of you, in the open, and you can see it. But if you're like me, and you would rather just change tracks from your pocket, the small buttons could be a pretty big issue. The iPod suffers from this issue too, although the iPod has significantly larger surface area on their buttons than the Zune does. And blindly feeling the surface of the iPod to find the Next button is much easier than doing the same thing on a Zune.

However, my biggest issue with almost all MP3 players except for the iPod is the lack of the iPod's scroll wheel. Apple has the scroll wheel patented out the ass, and nobody is going to Thunderdome with Apple on that, so it is an inherent flaw that all MP3 players besides iPod share. The scroll wheel is a brilliant piece of UI for the iPod, because it allows the user to start with their thumb wherever they wish, go as fast or as slow as they want, and signal to the device precisely how far to go and how fast to go. And since it's a circle, it allows for a continuous and uninterrupted stream of user input.

The Zune uses an up and down button. If you hold the button down, it begins scrolling through your music. The UI is able to keep up with you pretty quickly, which is very, very important for scrolling through huge libraries of music. I wasn't able to be anywhere near as accurate with the Zune's controls as I am with the iPod's, but it remains to be seen if someone who uses the Zune on a daily basis for awhile can ever match the accuracy of someone used to the iPod's scroll wheel.

Which is why I proposed a challenge to my three gullible Zune-buying friends, a challenge which two of them thus far have accepted. Their Zunes and my iPod will all be loaded with the exact same library (something in the several-thousand-songs range). All of the devices will then be restarted and brought back to the main menu. All of us will then be told to begin looking for a specific song by a specific artist by an independent timekeeper. The contest will begin, and all of us will begin looking for the song on our respective media players. First to find the song wins. I'm looking into getting a video of the event, which would then promptly get posted to the tubes.

So yeah. Microsoft's Zune sucks compared to the iPod. As it stands by itself, it's not a terrible PMP. Video playback was crisp and clear, navigation was intuitive, and it seemed like someone actually put some thought into it. But, unless you have some issue with the iPod or with iTunes (of which there are enough to justify getting something else), get an iPod.

I've got some more to discuss regarding the Zune, specifically involving its future, but that's another story for another day.

Introducing Tubular, the brand new YouTube client for OS X. Why would you want a YouTube client? Simple.

• It's pretty. Tubular was designed to have a simple, elegant, and out-of-the-way user interface that still manages to look gorgeous. With icons designed by Cyril Seillet and Tom Stoelwinder, and a user interface designed with the collective wisdom of dozens of people, Tubular is simply beautiful.
• It's familiar. Anyone who has used iTunes will feel right at home with Tubular's look and feel. We've taken the UI ideas given to us by iTunes and ran with them, producing a user interface that is intuitive and usable.
• It's useful. Features like one-click iPod conversion and drag-and-drop playback really give Tubular incredible utility to anyone who uses it.

We'll be unveiling more about Tubular in the next couple weeks. You can go check out the blog at TubularApp.com, where I'll be posting updates periodically.

I was looking for something that would display the currently playing iTunes song on my desktop. Nothing, however, seemed to really fit. No solution really looked like it belonged on a Mac's desktop. So, I wrote one. And here it is.

Introducing DeskTunes.

DeskTunes is a very simple, very elegant way to see what's playing in iTunes right now. It stays stuck to the bottom left corner of the Desktop, no matter what you do. It even stays put if you try and hide all of your windows with Exposé. You can also rate the currently playing song by clicking the star bar.

Simple. Elegant. Tiny. Out of the way. Beautiful.

The best part? It's totally, completely, eternally free. Click here to download it.

Update (4/18/2008): DeskTunes keeps getting talked about all over the place, and now on TUAW and Lifehacker. I'm planning on releasing DeskTunes as open-source soon. It'll be available on Google Code as soon as I get around to cleaning up the source code and making sure it works on Leopard. Thanks for checking it out!

Before last week, I'd never been to a Worldwide Developer's Conference. Hell, I'd never even been to San Francisco. So, in June, when Apple sent me the email saying that I was getting a free ticket through the door, I was very excited. Two months later, on Saturday, August 5th, and I'm on a plane headed to San Francisco.

After getting to the hotel, I went and walked around the Bay Area. Unfortunately, it was after 9 PM there, and pretty much everything of note closed (read: the Apple Store). I headed over to Moscone West, which was obviously closed. I tried to take pictures, but as I pulled out my camera, a large guy in an Apple Security shirt gave me a very, very dirty look, so no pictures.

On Sunday, the student specific events began. There, I met up with Drew Hamlin, Tristan O'Tierney, and Josh Smith. I also got to meet Aaron Hillegass from Big Nerd Ranch, who wrote the extremely excellent book Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X. If you're at all interested in programming in Cocoa, read this book. I also met with some of the people from the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft, who thought that with my kind of experience, I'd be a good candidate to work on the Mac version of MSN Messenger.

Now, I'm going to digress a little bit here. Two RIT students currently work on the totally awesome Yahoo Messenger for Mac. At least one RIT student, and probably more, work on serious parts of Adium, one of the best IM clients on OS X which supports multiple platforms. If I were to start working on MSN Messenger for Mac, that would mean RIT would have a near monopoly on the Mac instant messaging market.

Jason Harris from Unsanity arrived Sunday night. He would be my roommate for the week. After a long day, I crashed early in lieu of going to the OpenDarwin wake. Oh, and to get to the keynote nice and early.

I got to the line for the keynote at 6:30 AM. Already the line was about 30 feet long, which wasn't too bad. Drew Hamlin mentioned that he was 10th in line, after getting there at 5:30. The line started heading inside at 7:00, where we stood in the first floor of the WWDC lobby until 8:00.

The line then moved up the escalators into the second floor, where it looped around the second floor rooms. We sat in there for another hour, where I got to meet some other people, including Rosyna Keller, whom I'd met last year, and Slava Karpenko, both of Unsanity, as well as Karl Adam, a former RIT student who had a hand in starting the Growl project and works for Yahoo. The line started heading in around 9:00 into the Presidio, where the keynote was set to begin.

The keynote began at 10 AM, with John Hodgman, the PC from the Get a Mac ads, followed by the Keynote.

Opinion time! The features they showed in Leopard were extremely underwhelming. Time Machine is dead sexy, and I can't wait to start using it extensively for backup, but aside from that, the other features really don't seem too overwhelming. However, after the keynote, there were some sessions on the new APIs in Leopard. And despite being NDA'd from talking about them, I can say, with complete confidence, that the new APIs are crazy awesome.

Following the Keynote, I got to meet Phill Ryu, who I'd been working with since the launch of MacThemes, Austin Sarner, creator of AppZapper, John Casasanta from Inventive, and some others. I went and had lunch with the Unsanity guys, and went back for the sessions.

While I cannot talk about the sessions, I can talk about the three special events that were really awesome. The first was the Apple Design Awards, where John Casasanta won the Apple Design Award for Best Dashboard Widget, the gorgeous iClip lite. Those cubes are much heavier than they look. The second was the often publicized Stump the Experts event, or as it's referred to, Stump. Stump was incredibly awesome and funny, although it did seem a little unorganized. The third was the Apple Campus Bash, where I got to drink Apple's beer and have a really good time the day before the last day of the conference.

Friday, after the end of the sessions, I went and had dinner with Austin, John, and the Unsanity guys at a sushi bar. Later, I went and hung out with some people from RIT, which is where I was all of Saturday. Finally, Saturday night, I got on the plane and headed home.

It was one of the most exciting and awesome times of my life. I got to meet all kinds of awesome people, like Dave Watanabe of Acquisition, NewsFire, and Inquisitor, Brian Ball of MacZOT!, and Blake Burris from CocoaRadio. I got to learn a lot about Leopard and all of the underlying technology. But most importantly, I got some excellent advice and set up some business deals for my new app, which you'll all see a lot of very, very soon.

I write this hot on the heels of a post I made a few weeks ago, citing my insignificant attempt at turning the world away from the Dark Side of IE. Since that started, the use of MSIE by my readers has gone down to 26%. Certainly better than 33%, but not groundbreaking by any means.

I've been giving the topic a lot of thought lately, because I've often wondered why people don't use a browser that is clearly superior to IE (hell, I'll push Opera on people if it means getting them off IE). I think I've got a real reason why people aren't flocking to the Fox in hordes. And it's pretty chilling.

People don't switch from Internet Explorer because it is familiar and it is already there.

Most of the people who read my blog, as far as I know, are fairly competent with computers. They can read email, find stuff on Google, and maybe, just maybe, get some work done. Some of the people who read this blog are very competent with computers. They grok the ins and outs of every aspect of the machine they sit in front of (as well as the ones they sit on, next to, under, etc.). However, these are the people who are already on the better browser.

There remains a small amount of people who read my blog who just aren't technically savvy. They fear the computer, because they don't understand it. These are the people who are afraid to create, move, install, download, or delete anything because they fear that such an action could destroy their machine. They watch TV, see the Dell commercials, go and buy one for $400, and never do anything more than browsing the web and grabbing email (if they manage to configure everything properly).

These people won't install Firefox on their own. After all, what the hell is a "firefox" or a "mozilla" or a "thunderbird"? What benefit do they get out of installing this cryptically named piece of software (which they have no idea as to what it is), and then learning how to use it? To them, there is none. They don't see an advantage to changing.

On top of that, some of the features that we attribute to our workflow, like tabbed browsing, are too advanced for an uneducated computer user. They just don't get it. And that's understandable. Someone computer-illiterate probably has a reason for it, such as a lack of time to worry about how to use something as advanced as a computer. In fact, many of the features that Firefox boasts are features that normal people don't need.

• Faster Browsing. While everyone loves speed, Internet Explorer isn't slow enough to be considered crippling to someone who is checking stocks or news.
• Automatic Updates. Again, they are cryptically afraid of installing. What they have works - why should they update? It could disrupt their familiarity with the browser if anything new gets added or changed.
• Integrated Search. One word: overkill.
• Live Bookmarks. "What do you mean, my bookmarks change?" I can hear it now.
• Customization. Again, overkill.

Here's an example of what I mean. Imagine someone who has an analog alarm clock. For him, it works just fine. He sets the time, he sets the alarm, and it wakes him up. There is no snooze button, no digital display, no radio to wake them up, no volume control, nothing. Just a clock and some bells. But hey, for him, it works. At the same time, all of his friends are trying to get him to use a digital alarm clock. Why? "It's better!", we tell him. We ramble off the spec sheet on the back of the box. He understands the idea, but he doesn't see the point of changing what is already familiar to him. So he sticks with an analog clock.

So what can be done about this? Unfortunately, not much. The best thing that could possibly be done is for someone to write a Windows web browser, based on Gecko, that looks and feels EXACTLY like Internet Explorer. No tabs, no live bookmarks, no theme customization, nothing. Until then, we're stuck.

If you're one of those people who are still using Internet Explorer, I strongly urge you to give Firefox a try.

Check out the About Me page. I actually got around to writing it. And I made it a little different by using a special stylesheet.

Anyone vaguely familiar with RIT can most likely attest to one thing: the ratio of males to females is very skewed. The official ratio for the 2003-2004 academic year is 2:1, male to female. While that's the official head count, looking around the campus, you get the impression that the actual ratio is much higher - it really feels like 3:1 or 4:1.

Everyone on campus is very, very familiar with the ratio. As a male, I can attest firsthand on how much it sucks if you hate being single as much as I do. Your standards become significantly lower and almost anything that is single becomes a prospective. And I'm not trying to be chauvinistic or arrogant by stating this; it's simply a fact, and one that gets joked about. I've seen friends get turned into clingy, sycophantic, desperate attempts at being a boyfriend, simply because there is no alternative.

However, possibly even more than the males, the females at this school are very, very aware of the ratio at this school. This has a very adverse effect on the girlfriend economy, which does nothing but turn normal girls into spiteful, pompous, and deceitful women; the notion being that if Guy A puts so much as one toe over the line, the girl can go to guys B, C, D, E, and F, who will bend over backwards to fulfill the whim of this girl, simply because they have no choice.

Here's an excercise to give you an idea as to what I mean. Think back to high school, or, if it suits you better, the movie Mean Girls, whose title alone should give you a good idea as to where I'm going with this. Imagine the really gorgeous, popular girls who were fawned over by everybody. The chance that they were nice, pleasant people to anybody was very slim. These girls were the ones who were always cheating on their boyfriends (relationships which never, ever lasted), who always got what they wanted from the guys, and who would walk all over everyone (and no one cared). The popular girls, the cheerleaders, the plastics, the sluts; call them whatever you want.

They could get away with these acts because of the economy of dating. Anyone even remotely familiar with any economic principle knows about supply and demand. The main premise behind the economy of dating simply states that S/He who is most desirable is in least supply, and thus in highest demand. As demand goes up, so does price; the cost of dating the Desirable goes up considerably. It's like owning a Ferrari - you look great driving in it, but it falls apart if you don't keep pumping money into it.

To move to a different metaphor, consider the recent launch of the Xbox 360.* The massive shortages and the huge lines, all in the hopes the people would happen to walk home with a brand new console on that November night. These people were desperate to get their hands on one of these. Very desperate. They had heard about the shortages, but still came and stood in the cold anyway, just at the mere chance of procuring one. Once you decrease the quantity of something desirable that drastically, people start doing anything to get one. Anything.

And so our circle of metaphors closes. The inference that you, dear reader, should have made by now is simple. In general, an RIT girl has a tendency to have a very arrogant stride around campus, secure in the knowledge that guys will be throwing themselves at her, and she can shrug them off as she feels. It's probably not a concious decision, just an adopted mannerism given the dating economy and the ratio.

However, as I wrap this up, let me make it very clear that this does not uniformly apply to every single girl to walk the quarter mile. I've seen girls get attached to guys and be completely normal, unaffected by Sausage Syndrome. Unfortunately, these girls are few and far between.

Admissions, from what the student body has been told, has been working feverishly to reverse the ratio, although there are some problems attracting prospective female students to a school that prides itself on its engineering and computer science programs. But if they can manage to get the system back to an even level of entropy (hell, 1.5:1 would be awesome; we are that desperate), perhaps this whole problem can be solved.