July 2007 Archives

This site has some good info: http://mac2ubuntu.com/

I recently tried out amazon unbox on my Tivo. The basic idea is that you can rent movies from your Tivo. The setup process was reasonably painless, except I had to remember my Tivo account password, which I never use. So I ordered a movie that I thought I would like. It was $4, but it said that it stayed on your Tivo for 30 days. It probably said more than that, but I didn't read all the fine print. First buzzkill: you can't start watching the movie until it is completely downloaded. So I basically couldn't start it until very late at night, or the next day. So much for instant gratification. A few days later, I decided to go back and start watching the movie. So this notice pops up, and says that the movie will be deleted 24 hours after I start watching it. So if I want to watch half of it tonight, and half tomorrow night when I start to fall asleep, sorry, no dice. And that is $4? WTF? If I get a Netflix movie, it costs me on average about $3. I can watch it in pieces over the course of a week, or I can watch it four or fourteen times while I have it. Not only that, it shows up in about 1-2 days, effectively just as fast as the Amazon unbox movie. How stupid are these people? Why can't they simply create a service that people would LOVE? Hey, here's the formula, hollywood dipshits: let me download a movie for $1, let me watch it as much as I want for a week. I'll download a movie every day. With your current formula, yay, you've got my $4, and that's all you'll ever get. Gah.

I've always had trouble debugging layout problems on Safari. There is a hidden "debug" menu on Safari, but it almost completely useless, especially when compared to something like FireBug. Today I found that if you download the latest version of webkit, which is the open source Safari implementation, there is a visual DOM inspector thing that is really what you need. You right click on some page element, and select "Inspect element" then you get a nice DOM browser with highlighting, and details on CSS info, etc.

Suppose you have Apple Remote Desktop (which, it turns out, is a very nice administrative application if you have more than 2 macs to manage, or if macs that you manage are across slow net links). Suppose you need to connect with it to a Mac where you didn't enable it in the System Preferences. This is how you do it: 1. ssh to the machine (you *do* have to have sshd enabled, AKA "remote login") 2. run this command: $ sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -activate -configure -access -on -restart -agent -privs -all This will enable ARD for all users on the machine. Now you can connect in and fine tune whatever you want.

amazon is a huge bloated site, and it's annoying enough sometimes to shop there with a full computer. But I was able to search for, find and purchase two specific books I wanted. Safari seemed to crash twice, but remembered where I was each time. It wasnt exactly the most efficient way to shop, but it would do in a pinch. It's also worth noting that I was on a wifi link, not on EDGE. It would have been too slow otherwise. Oh, and I posted this note from the iPhone also. Good typing practice.

While you are typing, touch the ".?123" key, but don't lift your finger. Then slide your finger/thumb/tentacle over to the period/question mark/colon and lift. You'll get your mark and the keyboard with auto switch back to letter mode. Yay. Thanks to Gizmodo.

Often I have a bunch of numbers (like transfer sizes from an httpd log file) and I want to get the average in a shell script, without pasting into an excel sheet. Here's one way to do it. In this example, I want to calculate the average size of a cgi output. In my apache log format, column 7 is the transferred size in bytes. grep 'GET /some_url.cgi' access_log | cut -f7 | awk '{total += $1;count += 1;printf"avg = %d\n", total/count}' | tail -1

I tried out the Facebook polls feature. It's pretty cool. Just for fun, I created a poll asking people ages 35-49 a simple question. Treo got its butt kicked. Poor little guy! If you've got $10 to waste, try the same poll for the youngsters, and let me know what they like best.

This is a very interesting post by Jeff Atwood about Facebook as a walled garden. What is the open and public equivalent of social networks? It seems like it's some kind of future where everybody has their own "site," or network address or place that comprises blog, photos, email, IM and (most important) identity and relationship to other's identities. It would be purely peer-to-peer, and not branded by any one company, though it would certainly be hosted by a few big companies. In a way, we have a lot of that today, but it's limited to the real geeks (like me), and the authenticated connections just really aren't there. Very few people I know have OpenID, and I most of the people I know are big time geeks like me. It's clear to me that the walled gardens are necessary to launch new ideas, like social networking, since the complexity of creating the end game open system is too much for the norms to handle. But it's not clear if a relatively open walled garden, with a good dose of humility, can be easily dislodged. Look at AOL; they are still around, still generating a lot of cash, still serving millions of people. Facebook is at the very early stage of hegemony, will have quite a long reign.

I was able order an iPhone on the Apple store. I got on right at 9pm when the store opened, and it was getting killed. It took about 10 minutes to make the 5 or 6 clicks to order the phone. But it worked, I got a confirmation. I then read a lot of blogs that said the Apple stores had tons of phones, and no lines. I drove down to the local Apple store this morning. Sure enough, no line. Probably about 10 people in the store all checking out the iPhone. No one was at the checkout counter. I asked the Apple guy: "Got any 8 gig iPhones?" He said "Yup." I bought one. Brought it home, activated it (transferring my existing AT+T phone number) in about 7 minutes. Works perfectly. My email accounts, contacts and calendar synchronized automatically. Literally zero work in terms of setting up POP accounts or whatever. Picked up my home wireless automatically. Then I canceled my pending order at the online store. General first impressions: 1. It's smaller, and especially thinner than I expected. Makes my old Treo 650 look like an ancient brick phone from the 80s. 2. the "flick" scrolling is unbelievable spot-on. It's 100 times better than any other scrolling interface that has ever existed. The level of fine control you have is incredible, and it's completely intuitive. 3. on-screen keyboard is pretty easy to use. I haven't done any serious typing, like sending emails.