From the Mind of Trevor Stone

I realized today that the entire premise of one of the greatest Rock & Roll songs in history has been obsoleted by the 21st Century.

Long distance information, give me Memphis, Tennessee
Help me find the party trying to get in touch with me
She could not leave her number, but I know who placed the call
Because my uncle took the message and he wrote it on the wall

The geography is also a little questionable these days.

Help me, information, get in touch with my Marie
She's the only one who'd phone me here from Memphis, Tennessee
Her home is on the south side, high up on a ridge
Just a half a mile from the Mississippi Bridge

There are a couple small residential areas within half a mile of the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge in south Memphis. The most likely candidate is around Esplanade Pl and Riverside Blvd, which Google Maps shows as being next to some relief, though I wouldn't call it a ridge. Maybe Marie's house got torn down for an industrial facility in the last sixty years.

I did, however, finally realize what the relationship between Marie and the singer is.

Help me, information, more than that I cannot add
Only that I miss her and all the fun we had
But we were pulled apart because her mom did not agree
And tore apart our happy home in Memphis Tennessee

Last time I saw Marie she's waving me goodbye
With hurry home drops on her cheek that trickled from her eye
Marie is only six years old, information please
Try to put me through to her in Memphis Tennessee

Given Chuck Berry's reputation for interest in teenage girls (he was convicted of having sex with a 14-year-old after transporting her across state lines, though he appealed claiming prejudice), I'd always assumed that Marie was a love interest, but 6-years-old seemed disconcertingly wrong. But the song makes way more sense if the singer had a relationship with Marie's mother and developed a fondness for her daughter (either as the father or as the boyfriend of a single mother), but then got kicked out by the mother.

Here's a relaxed 1972 performance with Chuck Berry wearing a fabulous shirt.

Geuh. I'm not a fan of phone verification.

Really I'm not a fan of phones. I'd much rather deal with email than with phone calls. Telephones are so 20th Century; in the 21st Century I want to do all my communication over IP.

For a short while I had an assumed identity on Facebook. I don't want to use the service with my own information because I dislike their decision making process. But as a spokesperson and main online presence for an organization, I figured I'd do Facebook's users a favor and use the existing Group and Page for the organization. I was made an admin of the group and started answering questions, pointing to the official website that's associated with the group. After a few rounds of that, Facebook threw a speedbump at me, demanding a phone number or a photocopy of my ID. Screw that, I won't provide your users a service. Facebook: if you're developing a communication system that's better than email, why would I need a telephone to use it?

Now I'm in my hammock, about to go to sleep, trying to post our yard sale announcement to Craigslist. The post button sends an email. The email has a link to activate the post. But then I get asked for a phone number they can call or text. So I enter my Google Voice number and open Google Voice in a new tab. I wait a while. I hit the check status. I get a vague message that "Your phone number could not be verified. Please start over with another number." with a troubleshooting claim of "Some Voice over IP (VOIP) phone numbers (including Cricket, MetroPCS)." A little Googling found other Craigslist users that have found that Craigslist won't use Google Voice numbers for verification. Grrrrrrr. Edit: amusingly, after verifying that I have a frickin' phone number, I then get a CAPTCHA.

I really don't like it when a tool requires the use of a completely unrelated tool. I kinda want to go back to the old days when the only thing the Internet needed your telephone number for was a modem.

There's been a lot of noise in developer circles recently about Apple's new unusual iPhone developers agreement, particularly section 3.3.1. Briefly, Apple declared that you're not allowed to write iPhone/iPad/iPod software unless you use their tools to do it. Specifically, you're not allowed to write it using a level of abstraction that lets the application easily run on other devices like Androids, Windows Mobile phones, and BlackBerries.

A lot of people said this new change was targeted at Adobe, creators of Flash, a system for creating multimedia content that will work the same on any browser with their plugin installed. While the sorts of folks who comment loudly on this sort of thing have no love lost for Flash, being told how not to write software is a good way to rile up whole nests of developers.

Steve Jobs recently wrote an explanation of why he doesn't want Flash on the iPhone. He starts by painting Flash as a closed system -- Adobe controls the authoring tools and the play environment. He contrasts this with the open standards of HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, the technologies at the front of most websites. The great thing about HTML is that anyone can create stuff in it and anyone can access it with a browser tailored to their device's peculiarities. So far, so good.

But then Jobs completely undermines his discussion of the openness of the web by saying the most important reason they don't want Flash is that they think the applications with the best user experiences were written to take advantage of everything the iPhone (or Mac or whatever) offers. He suggests that it's best for the users if all iPhone apps are developed using Apple's tools:

Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our deAvelopers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen.

In other words, you can stand directly on Apple's shoulders, but you'd better not stand on the shoulders of someone standing on Apple's shoulders. If some clever company invents a new way of writing really great apps, the only way iPhone users will get the benefit of that innovation is if Apple deigns to adopt it.

Yet when you visit a website on the iPad, Apple doesn't stop you because the site's designers didn't adhere to Apple's user interface guidelines or because they used a tool like GWT to make the JavaScript work for all browsers. So if somebody wants to write an app that can run on iPhones, Androids, BlackBerries, and who knows what else, their choices are to write it twice: once for the iPhone and once for everything else. Or they can take Steve Jobs's advice and write it once for the web and bypass Apple's restricted platform. If they do the latter, they don't have to wait in App Store limbo, they can include porn if they want, and Apple doesn't take a cut of their profits. What's the down side?

So which is it, Steve? Are open standards the key to a good development environment and a good software ecosystem? Or is a single company controlling the platform the way to go?

Personally, I'm happy with my Android device which allows you to stand on as many shoulders as you like. It's shoulders all the way down.

If you get home to a sexy and explicit message on your answering machine and it turns out it was a wrong number, it's time to call porn *69.