Some interesting "iPhone" articles.

Ok, so probably less than a month after having an iPhone, I've been toying with the idea of developing some iPhone apps. Not necessarily to release them on the App Store, but just some personal utilities which do not exist, or I cannot find them on the App Store - can anyone find anything in the App Store, the search, as far as I can tell, is utter poo. In the process of investigating how to become an iPhone Developer, I've encountered a few interesting articles, on different aspects of the iPhone, the App Store & the Mobile market in general. BTW, the barrier to entry as an iPhone Developer is about $100. Without shelling this out to Apple, you only have access to an iPhone emulator in XCode, but will not be able to load any application on the actual device for testing. So anyways, I found this article entitled Caching Apple's Signature Server which appears to be written by iPhone Jailbreak hacker. Besides going into fascinating detail of several methods Apple uses to control what you do with the iPhone, I found the first two or three sections to be a fascinating reflection on where Apple came from (referencing the 1984 commercial) and where they are going (ending up to be the people who they despised in the 1984 commercial). The author also discusses why people do Jailbreak their phones, which, as he puts it, is about choice. Considering the state of the App Store, who can blame them. Which is a good lead in to The Inhospitable Land of the App Store, which I think is almost a required piece for any want to be iPhone Developer to read. The author discusses the risks associated with the App Store business model, not the least of which is the full editorial control App Store reviewers have over the submission and availability of applications in the store. The landscape seems ripe for a monopolistic challenge in the courts some day. The whole scene reminds me of line in the Suicidal Tendencies song Instituitionalized - "Wait, what are we talking about?! We decided?! My best interest?! How can you know, how can you say what my best interest is?" One final article is from Sun's own Tim Bray - Where’s the Mobile Biz? - which is a somewhat more level headed analysis of the overall mobile business, and with perhaps a more hopeful view that the future mobile landscape, stating among other things, that "...what Apple’s trying to do just can’t be scaled up..." I still haven't decided whether I'd cough up some cash to Apple. These articles paint a bleak picture for anyone who might want to be a full-time iPhone developer, which is depressing, but on the other hand, since computers are both my job and a hobby, I could maybe see forking out a bill or two, in order to tinker more with the iPhone and make it even more useful or me.

(2009-09-17 10:29:19.0) // Permalink

Remembering Mosaic at Sun

This probably dates me, but I still remember the time back in probably the mid 90's when Eric Schmidt as CTO at Sun, had to call a "Town Hall" meeting because so many employees were outraged that he had started charging departments something like $25 per month, per employee to use Mosaic. Considering where he is now, he clearly saw the light.

(2008-04-15 13:57:45.0) // Permalink

Is it me or does Mail.app suck?

Normally I steer clear of Mail.app on OS X, but I was trying to test something for Curtis so I had to actually go and set up an account in Mail.app. I don't know if its me, or people just don't do anything out of the normal on Macs, or its the Mac Fanatics who gloss over the issues but it seems like when ever I try to do something that seems simple on OS X, I get some cryptic message. This time its even better than the last time I had a problem So, as I mentioned, all I wanted to do was configure Mail.app to connect to my IMAP server. Now I run my own IMAP server, and it runs on a non-standard port, and SSL is enabled with a self-signed certificate. A little out of the ordinary, but Thunderbird handles it just fine. I muck around with the account setup options and find the places to enable SSL and change the IMAP port number. Not much different than Thunderbird. So I expected to see something similar to Thunderbird when I click "Get Mail" for the first time. Which is, that a notice about the self-signed certificate pops up, and I am asked to allow or deny it. Not so with Mail.app. It just spins a while. Never really gives up, never really does anything. Ok so a quick web search and I find about Mail.app and self-signed certificates so I give it a try. Try to quit and restart Mail.app. First off I need to force quit. Odd. When it starts up, The icon next to the INBOX is different. And here's the greatest error message of all. I click on Mail.app, and all I hear is a "Bong". WTF does that mean?!

(2008-01-23 15:56:30.0) Comments [1] // Permalink

ReadyNAS Power Consumption

For anyone who might want to compare the power consumption of a ReadyNAS NV+ with a TeraStation, I've slapped the Kill-A-Watt on my ReadyNAS, and here are a couple of numbers. Unlike the TeraStation, the ReadyNAS can be set to spindown all the drives. With all drives spun down, The ReadyNAS draws only 26W. With four segate 500GB drives, configured for XRAID, all spun up, the box draws 50W. Not too bad. I haven't watched the peak draw at power up, but that's probably not such a big deal since its a temporal event. For comparison, check out Rama's numbers for the TeraStation.

(2007-06-15 10:27:50.0) Comments [2] // Permalink

Mac vs. Windows Campaign

Ok, so I have been enjoying using my MacBook Pro, but I gotta say, the "Mac vs. Windows" advertising campaign that Apple has been running for a while always makes me laugh. One of the recent commercials has "Mac" talking about how cryptic "Windows" error messages are. As far as I have encountered with Mac, that can't be farther from truth. Notice the message I received trying to connect to a network drive. How incredibly helpful.

(2007-05-06 08:41:03.0) // Permalink

It's a Mac Mac Mac Mac World

Rama made a good point recently about how he prefers a system that can handle dual roles (of server and desktop.) Those sentiments fit me as well. I like a system that can fit multiple roles, but for me its a little different. At least for a desktop/laptop I like a system that can handle the typical "consumer" role - read mail, web browsing, view media, create video, and so on - but I also like to be able to code/debug on it as well. Solaris does a great job at coding/debugging role. It is Solaris which I am most comfortable doing anything technical with. And that extends to providing a good base desktop environment to help me be productive. But lets face it, Solaris lacks somewhat when it comes to rich media. I've cobbled together a set of applications - mplayer, totem - that let me view most types of video but the experience is far short of superior. And the lack of suspend/sleep makes laptop use less than stellar. Windows, on the other hand, is quite the opposite. Its a very good "consumer" desktop. Rich media is pretty solid. There's a ton of applications available to do specialized things. For example, I've got a few digital non-linear video editing applications that I use to edit movies of my kid. But I have never been comfortable coding on Windows. Even with Cygwin installed to make it look more like UNIX, it still falls short for me. MacOS, so far, is a good balance between the two. There's a good deal of consumer applications available. And the UNIX foundation of X gives me all/most of the tools I need to code/debug. Now I'm still going to use Solaris to deploy applications on, but MacOS gives me some new opportunities to the code/debug cycle. I can sit on the couch with the TV on, much like I'm doing now, and hack up something that comes to mind. That said, I still have a few more gripes against MacOS... What a drag - Why on gawd's great earth can you only resize a window from that tiny box in the lower right corner? This drives me crazy to no end. Windows, GNOME and even CDE support resizing from any edge/corner. Doing some searches this seems to be a common complaint. More space please - Man I guess I am really spoiled with JDS/GNOME. I really miss workspaces too. Its strange that when I'm working with Windows I can deal with no workspaces, probably mainly because my only XP system is dual headed so at least there is more real estate in general. I love workspaces because I am generally working on multiple things thoughout the day, and workspaces allow me a way to organize my open applications by task. Shopping list - The Finder's inability to set the default view of all folder to list is pretty lame. I can set between icon view and column view as the default, but oddly, list view cannot be set as a default. I've spent a lot of time searching for a way to do this, and have been led down several dead ends. Even asked Levi about it. He did find an AppleScript to run through all folders changing the view which is cool until you get to networked filesystems. So for now, I'm just changing the view of each folder as I encounter them.

(2007-02-12 12:09:50.0) Comments [2] // Permalink

MacBook Pro - The Happy Entry

Ok, so after my last entry, a couple of my coworkers blasted me as Mac hater. Well I'm not, so in this entry I will attempt to write about a few of the cool things I like. But here's the deal. I'm sure everyone has been a situation where a movie has been so hyped up by friends, that it cannot possibly meet your expectations. Napolean Dynamate was one of those movies that I can remember. And at first, I didn't see what the big deal was. But after watching it for the second and third time, I have come to enjoy it. Well, the Mac is pretty much the same way. People are so fanatical about the Mac, that one just can't help being hypercritical about it. That's just how people are. So anyways... Its pretty inside too - What better thing to go with the fit and finish of the laptop than to provide a good looking desktop environment with it. Animations and other large BITBLT operations are incredibly smooth. The Mac has set a new standard for this. There some functional things that I miss in GNOME and XP but they are largely nit picks. Look ma, its UNIX - I've been using a Java-based SQL explorer lately called HenPlus. One optional component is the ability to use the GNU readline library via JNI. Being a BASH user since college over 17 years ago (ish!) readline is in my blood. So looking to compile it on OS X, I found some compilation instructions. Which worked like a charm. The only difference from what was described was that I wanted to place the shared library with the rest of HenPlus instead of in /Java/Library. I thought LD_LIBRARY_PATH would do the trick, but it didn't. After a little searching, I found that the correct environment variable is DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH. No biggie. No, its really UNIX - Over the years at Sun, living through the Motorola to SPARC and Intel year, and from SunOS 4.x to SunOS 5.x, I have put together a rather complex shell envionment which sets environment variable and such based on the architecture and platform, among other things. I pulled that environment over to my MacBook home folder, fired up Terminal and watched. Low and behold, it just worked. All I really needed to do was set up a config file for MacOS to adjust some variables, and voila! Fink or DarwinPorts - After my initial experience with Fink, Jed turned me on to DarwinPorts. My initial attempt at trying to use DarwinPorts failed before I realized I needed XCode installed, but worked like a charm afterwards. This may be one of those religious debates. Since Fink provides precompiled binaries, its a little easier to get going with than DarwinPorts, but there is something about having binaries compiled for your exact platform. Not to mention DarwinPorts has a native Carbon version of XEmacs available. After doing a little comparison, DarwinPorts appears to have more up to date applications, so for now I have punted Fink. Spotlight or Quicksilver - Perhaps another one of those religious debates. Levi has it on his essentials list, but after reading about it I didn't quite see how it differed from Spotlight. And, in fact, there are several comparisons out there. Each appear to have their advantages. I'm typically not fond of full-disk indexers but since MacOS is foreign to me right now, it seems like a good idea. It sounds like Spotlight might be a little more efficient in indexing, so for now I'm going to stick with it. Overall, a good week with the MacBook.

(2007-02-03 07:52:25.0) // Permalink

MacBook Pro/Day 2 - Another View

Ok, Since Rama started blogging about his MacBook Pro experience. I guess I should too. Here's some initial impressions, in no particular order. Flipping Latch Button - By far the most annoying thing. I'm almost ready to do a web search to see who's got the best way to open one of these suckers. My technique has evolved into holding the back of the 'puter with one hand, while shoving a finger in the latch. But there has got to be a better way. What? Me change? - Instead of taking this as opportunity to change how I work, I have found that I've spent much of my time trying to make things the way they are on my Solaris and Windows boxes. Pitched Safari, in favor of Firefox. And with it comes Thunderbird for email. I've found Fink for all my favorite Open Source wares. Fink is much like Blastwave which I have a love/hate relationship with. XEmacs, how does thou window? - XEmacs is what led me to Fink in the first place. After I used FinkCommander to install XEmacs, I eagerly opened a Terminal to start the sucker up, only to see it fire up in TTY mode, not Windowed. DOH! After reading a few FAQs I realized I had to fire up XDarwin - as well as install XUser.app, to get X Windows back. Its pretty - I am impressed with the fit and finish of the laptop. Definitely one of the better looking and compact laptops I've owned. And incredibly quiet. Nice. I think Rama's initial entry profiled the size differences between the Ferrari and MacBook. That was part of my motivation for giving it a try. The slightly smaller footprint works much better in the Dakine "Transit" Street bag I just switched to. APPLE - COMMAND - CONTROL - The new keyboard shortcuts take a little of getting used to. Many are the same as Windows and GNOME, but others use the APPLE/COMMAND modifier with the usual key instead of the CONTROL modifier I am used to. Oh and CONTROL is way too small. I end up hitting FN lots of times instead. The most annoying of the shortcuts is that I can't use APPLE-TAB to roll between both X11 and Darwin apps. I have to hit APPLE-TAB to get to the X Applications, then hit APPLE-` to toggle through my X11 applications. You are getting sleepy - The laptop sleep mode - and resulting wake up - is very nice. Although I didn't have huge problems with sleep on the Ferrari, the MacBook Pro is much quicker at both sleeping and waking up. Ok. That's the brain dump for now. I'm trying not to form too much of an opinion about the user interface until I get more experience with it.

(2007-01-28 16:07:39.0) Comments [2] // Permalink

Evolution, Thunderbird and my hate-hate relationship with LDAP

A few years ago, I started to grow tired of having different Address Books at work and at home, each with a partial, and sometimes out of date list of contacts. So I started to look for a solution that would allow me to maintain only one copy that was accessible mainly at home and work, but any where else on the internet I might pop up. At the time, I was using various flavors of the Ximian Evolution groupware client. And I had noticed that for address books it supported an LDAP provider. And after various emails to the OpenLDAP and Evolution mailing lists both to try to get information about Evolution's requirements of LDAP, and also to complain that there was no cookbook to show a simple OpenLDAP configuration, I managed to get everything working. And the world was good. But I started to grow unhappy with Evolution for multiple reasons. Which was unfortunate because it has a really great address book, the Virtual Folders (aka Views in DtMail lingo), were pretty good too, however I started to outgrow some of its ability to manage mail folders. It seemed to do weird things with scanning lots and lots of mail folders just during what would seem to be a simple check of my INBOX which would cause the entire interface to pause for up to 30 seconds a time. Pretty annoying when you're in the middle of typing an email. So I took a look at this fledgling mail client called Mozilla Thunderbird. And after looking at it, I found that it supported something they call Saved Searches, which do pretty much the same thing as Evolution's Virtual Folders. And after a little testing I found that it did not appear to have any problems with subscribing to lots of big mail folders, so perhaps 4 months ago I made the switch and dumped Evolution entirely. Now, recently I started to look at trying to get my LDAP Address Book back, and doing some initial poking around I saw that Thunderbird did, in fact support an LDAP provider. So I eagerly gave it a try, plugged in my host and port, and basedn, and gave it a whirl. The results were less than awe inspiring. Although it did show the basic info like name and email address, it did not show all of the street addresses for example and most other personal information. Well, whatever, looks like its going to be more work that I wanted to do, so I put it on the back burner for a while. Until a last week. I gave another whack at it. First of all I remember when I set things up for Evolution, it expected a special evolutionPerson LDAP schema. So I wondered if there was something similar for Thunderbird, and after doing a bit of Googling[tm]. I found a few sites that mentioned both mozillaOrgPerson schema and a mozillaABPersonObsolete schema. That second one doesn't sound that hot, so I started to pursue the first one. I found this dude Jason Jason's Notes who appeared to get things working ok. So I grabbed a copy of the mozillaOrgPerson schema, installed it in my OpenLDAP server, created an entry which included some attributes from mozillaOrgPerson, then tried to load it into Thunderbird.... No love. Jason's post mentions an article on linux.com. So I took a look at it. They appear to have gotten things working too. What the heck? So I go back and do some more tinkering around. I start wondering in Thunderbird may be caching entries locally somehow, so I exit it and restart it multiple times, and change some fields I know I can see, just to confirm that it isn't caching anything locally. Well, I'm not loosing my brain there. Continuing down the link trail, the linux.com article mentions a few Thunderbird bugs filed regarding LDAP support. I take a peek at the bugs an notice they are all talking about the mozillaOrgPerson schema again. That's really of no help because I had pretty much proved to myself that the attributes in mozillaOrgPerson are ignored by Thunderbird. I should mention that at some point I found the the document LDAP in Mozilla Thunderbird which has a lot of good info, but considering the date of the document compared to work on the aforementioned bugs, I dismissed this document as the typical OpenSource documentation kruft.. I mean really the document was last updated in 2003, thats centuries in Internet Time. Instead, I started to search around for this mozillaABPersonObsolete LDAP schema. I figured that although it may be an older schema, if Thunderbird recognizes it, then so be it. Only problem was that I really didn't find much to go on. Now this is really driving me crazy. I clearly see in the Thunderbird Address Card a huge amount of fields, more specifically, I was interested in the Home Address fields. Why would this appear in the interface if they are unused. I know now that I was a little too focussed on the LDAP provider side of things. I realize now, that the same Address Card is used for the built-in File-based provider. And in that mode, I can managed Home Addresses. But before I realized this, I was still hopeful that I could see something in the LDAP-based Home Address fields. So I decided to do some brute force work. This is where snoop is definitely your friend. I fired up snoop, then brought up the Address Book and captured the packets. I was hoping over-the-wire, LDAP was a (mostly) text based protocol, and fortunately it is. I decrypted the packets enough to see what was going on. I found that a query was being issued against the LDAP attributes (mail, cn, givenname and sn). Ok, nothing too surprising there. However, the set of attributes that were returned are (modifytimestamp, xmozillausehtmlmail, description, notes, custom4, custom3, custom2, custom1, birthyear, homeurl, workurl, nscpaimscreenname, countryname, company, o, departmentnumber, department, orgunit, ou, title, countryname, zip, postalcode, region, st, locality, l, streetaddress, postofficebox, carphone, cellphone, mobile, pagerphone, pager, facsimiletelephonenumber, fax, homephone, telephonenumber, xmozillasecondemail, mail, xmozillanickname, displayname, commonname, cn, surname, sn and givenname.) Looking over the list, I really didn't see anything that looked like it might be used for th e Home Address fields. crap. And except for a couple of attributes, I don't see any of the ones defined in mozillaOrgPerson. double crap. But hmmm. These looked pretty familiar. Where did I see them. Oh, wait, they referenced in that LDAP in Mozilla Thunderbird I had already dismissed. Son of a. It really is the current information on the LDAP integration. So for now I guess I am SOL. The most I will be able to squeeze out of the Thunderbird Address Book is the name and email, which is OK for many uses. However I will have to use yet another client to see the full records and do general management, which I was hoping to avoid. Fortunately I have found JXplorer. A Java based, Open Source LDAP Browser, which should do the trick for now. I'm not sure what to take away from this experience. Perhaps one is to scrutinize documents more closely - rereading the LDAP bugs for thunderbird I do see now that none of the work has made it to a general release yet.

(2005-08-25 09:52:00.0) Comments [7] // Permalink

Picking a Video Encoding.

Recently I purchased a camcorder to document my child as she grows up. Nice thing about it is that its a digital camcorder, and through a Firewire connection I can upload video to my computer, and create clips that I can send to the grandparents. Only problem is which video encoding to pick. Through some video editing I've done previously, my first choice was obviously MPEG-2. Its pretty standard, considering its the encoding used in DVDs. Only I forgot that because MPEG-2 is a licensed technology, typically one needs to purchase some DVD player software in order to get a MPEG-2 decoder installed on one's computer. And because of that, a few people I had sent some clips to were unable to view them. Doh! So I began searching for a different encoding, one that is supported on a variety of platforms - MacOS, Windows and Linux or Solaris - and that one that does a decent job of compression, something suitable for broadband, but not necessarily streaming. I ended up putting together a survey of several different formats. But haven't chosen one yet. However, in my quest to find out more about different available encodings, I ran across a set of pages at MIT. A Video Guide for the MIT Computer Graphics Group. The Compression and General Video Info sections I found to be pretty good overviews several topics. Whoops, I just realized, the best pages on the different encodings aren't even linked from the main page. The Codec Comparison goes over 20 or 30 different encodings, probably half of which I never heard of.

(2005-02-17 21:29:01.0) Comments [5] // Permalink

Apple's Dirty Little Trick

I'm surprised that Apple has stooped to this level. Recently I went to install a copy of QuickTime for Windows. As I progressed through the download pages, I see that along side the Windows 2000 checkbox, it mentions "includes iTunes". Hmm, well, I don't really want iTunes, but whatever. I continue on, and as it prompts me for a location to save the file, I notice that the file name is "iTunesSetup.exe". Hmm. That's kind of weird. So then, after the download, I fire up the installer, and what do I get? Yep, you guessed it, an iTunes install, which includes QuickTime, of course. What the FRICK! I expect this sort of thing from vendors like AOL, DELL, and your smaller mom-and-pops. But from highly image conscious Apple. No. No! This is unacceptible. Just because you have one de-facto standard application, this does not mean you can glom on anything else you want to force down our throats. Gah!

(2005-01-12 16:38:49.0) Comments [3] // Permalink

Uphill battle for the desktop

Here's a great story. My in-laws recently upgraded their personal computer. A nice, well equiped Dell, PC. They also finally upgraded to DSL from a 56K modem and AOL account. A few days info their migration we all started seeing them sending mail from a new address. An msn.com address, gasp! Not only did I wonder why they chose MSN, but some of their computer-savvy siblings as well. So later that week, my wife called, she could tell they were struggling with setting up an email account, and as she helped them, she asked why they chose MSN. Their answer was enlightening. They said "Well, when we clicked the Email button, it took us to MSN, so we thought it was already set up on the computer and we had to." How do you compete with that? Essentially what they are saying is that it doesn't matter if there is a superior product out there. They may not know about it. And even if they do, how do you convince them that its worth the effort to install and learn it? I don't know, if you ask me, it's quite an uphill battle for anyone to replace Windows as the de-facto personal desktop.

(2004-12-20 14:24:05.0) // Permalink

Favorite GNOME Themes

I recently installed a Wiki for my personal use, to keep various notes, configuration instructions, etc. And I was updating a page on my GNOME settings, so I decided to go to art.gnome.org and see if anything new caught my eye. The themes there are sortable by popularity. So for grins and giggles, I decided to see how popular my favorite GNOME themes are. I like pretty simple themes, so not surprisingly, my favorites are pretty low. For Window Borders, I like TigertCrack 1.2.1. In popularity, it is way down, at number 84 of 112. What's kind of interesting is that there are other similar themes like Niknak that are much higher. Niknak is at number 13 in popularity. I think the buttons on Niknak are too large though. My Login Manager theme didn't fare as bad. I like the Glass Foot theme, which sits a 22 of 66. So its well in the top 3rd in popularity. There are alot of more flashy themes above this. I guess if you wanted to make a bold statement, this is where to do it. Angel is a nice theme at number 4 but I don't think it would hold up in the corporate world. Too risque. And last of all is the Application theme. I go pretty simple here, with subtle flair. ThinIce is the one. As the description states "Just a nice and fast theme." Amen. But as far as popularity goes, this one ranks way down at 143 of 166. My guess is that part of the reason this one is so low is that it "ships" as part of the GNOME distribution, at least in newer versions of GNOME. So, no need to download separately.

(2004-10-07 08:29:06.0) Comments [7] // Permalink

CVS as a filesystem

As I mentioned in my Bad, Mozilla. Bad! entry, I have several computers and operating systems I use daily. Besides just keeping bookmarks up to date, over the years I've found that there other critical files that I need to keep synchronized in all environments. For example, many of the "dot" files (.bashrc, .bash_profile, etc.) are pretty essential to keep me sane in every environment. I found a pretty clever way to keep these files all up to date. I use CVS! For files like this which don't change very often, its a great hack to use CVS as a quasi-distributed filesystem. And what's even better is all the files are versioned. And fairly straight forward. I put a CVS server on a machine that all the other machines can access, and create a project to check all my essential files into. It doesn't have any firewall barriers that aren't insurmountable, if I use runsocks for example. And I can even securely transfer files by using either ssh or stunnel. Currently I have all my "shell" files, I have many common images and icons I use for GNOME launchers, I have X11 client app-defaults files, and common scripts and executables, all in a single project. I've even put together a fairly elaborate way of maintaining machine and operating system specific configs for shell environments that get automatically loaded for the appropriate system. Its worked quite well for me for the last several years.

(2004-09-28 15:26:35.0) Comments [2] // Permalink

Bad Mozilla, Bad.

Every so often I start to look into a problem I have with my Mozilla bookmarks. Between the number of computers operating systems I use at work and at home, I ended up with maybe 4-6 separate copies of my Mozilla bookmarks. I keep hoping that someone would write some sort of plug in that would help me synchronize all the differences, but so far nothing. So the other day I decided that I could write a simple Java application to do the job. I thought this would be easy, there are alot of XML parsing libraries that should make quick work of the bulk of the processing. Although I remembered that Netscape Navigator's bookmarks file was HTML, complete with unclosed elements I assumed that this was one thing they would fix with Mozilla. Make the bookmarks file well formed XML. Bzzzt. Sorry. You lose. It doesn't appear to. Dang! This is looking like something more than a quick hack. Oh well, guess I better just keep googling.

(2004-09-27 17:21:12.0) Comments [3] // Permalink