July 2008 Archives

A nice article by Wil Shipley: http://wilshipley.com/blog/2008/07/mojave-experiment-bad-science-bad.html

1. I don't care that you say it's pronounced "cool." It's going to be pronounced "kwill." It's like Sony coming out with the line of TVs spelled "WEGA" and saying it should be pronounced "Vega." 2. Fail. (one of many examples): Sorry, I try to keep snark out of the blog as much as I can. But when you storm onto the scene and say "we're bigger than google," I can't control myself.

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/flash-tub/computer-fight-cartoon.php

And this post was written with it.

I was going to download this cool-sounding app that cleans up your iTunes library: fixes cover art, track names etc. Then I noticed the download took me to a .exe file, and got all annoyed. Then I went back and noticed this little disclaimer which made me lol and stop being annoyed.

Dabbleboard

iPhone: Flight info Hotel info Boston Coach info Fully charge Computer: presentation verify keynote is installed on computer verify VPN to home/work verify iDisk sync charge computer Laptop bag: Empty first Full itinerary on a piece of paper, in outer pocket, and on fridge at home. paper copy of conference agenda Computer + charger ipod + headphones extra iphone headphones extra ipod USB cable ipod/iphone wall charger camera? 2 books medicine bag toothbrush mp3 cd of good music if renting a car energy bar pen notebook/paper business cards eyeglasses case so I don't leave them on the plane in the seatback again! Duffle: clothes + 1 day extra swimsuit dress shirt? dress shoes? Wear: phone travel watch sports jacket dress shirt minimize wallet

For me, MobileMe has been a fucking disaster. First, during the first few days I had ENDLESS contact/calendar conflicts, and MobileMe actually deleted a random set of about 100 contacts. That's all settled down now, but now iDisk has become so unreliable that it's almost pointless. If I don't explicitly sync up a computer, and then check that something made it up to the server (via the web UI), then get on the other client computer, and push the sync button, and sometimes reboot, and push the sync button a few more times, nothing syncs. This is despite the fact that everything is set to "Automatically" synchronize. Guess what? Copying stuff to my personal web site and manually copying it back down is less of a hassle. And I'm paying for this? Bleah.

There is a ton of info on the iPhone dev center on developer.apple.com. But two things I have found particularly enlightening for an "old" like me are this tutorial and Aaron Hillegass's book "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X." Hilleglass has just about the right amount of detail for a programmer like me, with more years of experience than I would like to admit.

The iPhone apps are great. But one is conspicuously absent. Where is SSH?

Here are some of the issues I ran into upgrading my iPhone to 2.0 and switching .Mac to MobileMe. There are 4 Macs that I work on: two desktop iMacs at home, one Mac Pro at work and my MacBook. The main reason I have always had .Mac and the main reason I will use MobileMe is so I can sync contacts between them. All the Macs I have got the OS patch to switch .Mac to MobileMe except for one of the iMacs at home. No matter what I did, Software Update said there were no new updates. Usually, patches are available on the Apple downloads site, but for some reason MobileMe was not. The reason I cared about this was that on the Mac I was using (my Mac Pro at work) kept complaining of sync conflicts every 15 minutes. Furthermore, it decided it should delete a bunch of random contacts. I suspect that there was some incompatibility between the .Mac sync protocol of the rogue iMac at home and MobileMe protocols. Eventually, I managed to find a MobileMe patch package file on a local Software Update server. We'll see if that clears up the problems. Another problem I had was of my own doing: I upgraded to an early version of firmware for iPhone 2.0. Apparently, the firmware was for 3G phones, I had to reflash with the official 2.0 firmware for old iPhones. This went pretty smoothly, except that the application "sync" erased all the apps I had downloaded to my iPhone. So I've had to redownload everything, and I'm going to have to re-enter all my settings, like flickr passwords and stuff. I did have a number (3-4) OS crashes of the iPhone, but I'm hoping that's because I was using the wrong firmware. MobileMe looks promising so far, but it's quite slow. Selecting a single contact takes over 20 seconds to load in the web browser. Hopefully the MobileMe folks will get a handle on performance once the initial launch problems are cleared up.

I didn't buy a new iPhone today. I'm not buying one this week. They weren't on sale when I wrote this post! Duh! I might get one later, it depends on how much faster they actually are on 3G, and whether I think that's really worth another $180/year. For now, I've upgraded my old iPhone to the new software. It's really great. Best things: Apple Remote App: controls iTunes and Apple TV over wifi. Mobile Flickr App: SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much better than browsing Flickr in Safari. Update: Exposure is a slightly slickr app, and it's free. NYTimes App: See Mobile Flickr App MobileMe push email. My mac.com account seems to have transitioned without a problem. It seems to take between 5 and 15 seconds for a "push" message to my mac.com email address to arrive on my phone. I'm wondering if I should forward my gmail to my mac.com, and stop reading gmail on the iphone directly. Hmm, probably not. If I understand the "push" architecture correctly, Gmail should be able to push to iPhone pretty easily, and hopefully they will get on that. MobileMe over-the-air Contact sync. Yes! Stupid things: there are at least 3 "tip calculating" apps. AND THEY ALL COST MONEY! How stupid do you have to be to pay $2 to have someone tell you what 20% (or 15% or whatever) is of your lunch tab? Are you so stupid you can't use Calculator to multiply by 1.15? WTF?

Turn off leopard dock. Change background to solid color. Turn off Genie effect. Increase keyboard repeat speed to max. Install developer tools (xcode), firefox, macports, mysql. Macport installs: lynx, openvpn2, wget. Firefox: install web developer, firebug, tamper data, foxmarks. Turn off auto update check for plugins, browser, search engines. .mac: sync contacts, safari bookmarks, idisk. home directory: copy .ssh, emacs files, cshrc and environments, bin directory. Download Sprint Novatel U727 drivers. Install IPSecuritas, configure ipsec for home, work.

It's time for a new laptop. Should I get a black MacBook or a MacBook Air? I keep waffling. I basically use it for remote access to my work/home desktop computers, for web browsing and email. Black:

Faster (33%50%) More Disk Space (3X) Faster Disk (5400RPM) Has DVD Cheaper ($300)

Air:

Awesome LED backlit display Smaller

I'm leaning towards the BlackBook. Update: BlackBook it is! What put me over the edge (aside from *cough* $300) was lack of an ethernet port on the Air. I don't want to carry around a stupid dongle to plug in to a LAN.