Category: Computer 
So I’m browsing around the Apple iTunes App Store looking for a cool game for my iPhone, and I’m reading some reviews about a few games when I notice that the iTunes Store allows people to sort of review the review. At the end of each review is a simple question: “Was this review helpful?” followed by clickable “Yes” and “No”. To the far right of the review title, it tells you how many people found the review helpful. The problem is that it thinks App Store users are “listeners”, when I’m pretty sure they’re “users”.
A song from the Music Store. 2247 “listeners” found the review helpful.
A movie from the Movie Store. 456 “viewers” found the review helpful.
An app from the App Store. 18 “listeners” found the review helpful.
I guess someone copied and pasted code from the Music Store and never made the change?
Several days ago I was trying to figure out the elevation of an elevation marker near my apartment. I couldn’t read it off the marker itself, so I scoured the Internet to see if I could find a topographical map of Manhattan. No matter what I searched for, or where I searched, I couldn’t find a map that displayed what I was looking for. I got tons of topographical maps for sale, but that really wasn’t what I wanted. After trying for what seemed like days (in actuality, it was 63 minutes), I broke down and asked my father if he had any idea on where to look, or even if he could look next time he was in or near the library. Less than a day later, he e-mailed me back with an answer to my question. He had gone to the NY Public Library and found the answer to my query in a matter of minutes using nothing more than the map room and a verbal question (thanks Dad).
In contrast, the first published collection of the plays of one William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon is generally known as the “First Folio”. It was published in 1623 and of the roughly 1,000 copies produced, about 230 are known to be in existence. In 2001, Christie’s auctioned one of the two still in private collections for over $6 million. Next to the Gutenberg Bible, it’s probably the most famous printed book in history. The NY Public Library has a copy, but access to it is limited to researchers “who demonstrate a need to use this irreplaceable material”, which is why I would probably never be able to see it. However, thanks to the University of Victoria, a scanned copy of a First Folio can be browsed online, in all it’s glory; and unlike the printed facsimiles available in bookstores, the resolution of the web copy at the large size is very, very good, and you certainly can’t beat the price.
Sigh.
Update: Time Warner Cable just called to tell me about the benefits of home phone service (the only reason I answered the phone was because I thought they were calling about my issue). I interrupted the woman from her script to let her know that my internet service through them was quite bad at the moment and that the only reason we were able to talk on the phone is because I don’t have phone service through them. She was quite flustered at that. I also tested my internet connection while she was on the phone, and it’s even worse.
Update: Yay!
When I got a new MacBook Pro I also ordered VMWare Fusion at the same time so I could run Windows and play around with a linux installation or two. It works great, but I ran into a problem trying to install Solaris 10.
Windows XP, Vista, and Ubuntu all installed without issue, but the installation of Solaris, both graphical and text-based would hang at various points. When I finally got it installed, it would hang on running, never even making it to the login screen. The problem was that even though I was specifying a 32-bit VM in VMWare, the Solaris installation was still identifying the Penryn chip as supporting 64-bit, so Solaris would install the 64-bit version. I wasn’t sure that was the whole problem, but I knew that was the first troubleshooting step. After a doing a little exploration around the interwebs, I found a very simple solution to that problem.
Continue reading . . .
How come Interface Builder 3.1, the latest version as of the time of this post, shows rounded application menu corners when OS X Leopard did away with them?
You gotta love Apple sometimes. People have been asking begging for the ability to create their own custom ringtones out of songs they already own since before the iPhone was released. At first, Apple said, “No, you have to buy them for $0.99 after you buy the song for $0.99.”
People cried foul. “Why do I have to pay an additional fee when I already own the song?” was the common refrain. “What if I want to make my kids singing as my ringtone?” was another.
It looks like Apple finally relented. As you can see from this support article, there’s now a way for Mac users (sorry PC), using the latest version of iLife, to export 40-second clips to the iPhone as a ringtone. However, THIS IS THE ONLY MENTION OF THAT FACT ON APPLE’S WEB SITE. In fact, in the description of the update to GarageBand that enables this functionality, it just says, “This update improves overall stability and addresses issues with file export to iPhone.”
Sneaky Apple, very sneaky.
If you’re in IT, or just like to hack around with computers, you invariably run into HEX numbers. About the only fun thing with HEX is that since it uses the letters A-F, you can use it to write out words. 0xDEADBABE, 0xDEADBEEF, 0xBABECAFE, 0xDECAFBAD, and 0xDEFEC8ED (defecated) are the standard ones that come to mind.
You can use this command
egrep “^([a-fo]|ate|to|too|two|for|four)*$” /usr/share/dict/words
to print out a list of words on a *NIX system that can be rendered in HEX using ‘0’ for ‘o’, ‘8’ for ‘ate’, ‘2’ for ‘to’/’too’/’too’, and 4 for ‘for’/’four’. On Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), the above command finds the following ‘words’:
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This evening I was copying a large video file from my desktop “server” to my Mac laptop over wireless. During the transfer, my wireless connection conked out, as it does once in a while. When it conks out in the particular fashion that it did this evening, it generally takes about 20 minutes for it to recover, and all wireless networking is useless during this time. Because this “conk out” session happened in the middle of a file transfer, Finder became hopelessly confused, even after the wireless connection was reestablished. As I tried to get Finder to behave correctly, it became clear to me that I was going to have to restart it.
In the past, when I need to quit a misbehaving application, I click on the little blue Apple logo in the menu bar, click on the Force Quit… menu item, and then the Force Quit Applications window would open. I could not do that this evening since Finder is the application responsible for making the menu bar function. Since I couldn’t use the mouse to accomplish what I wanted, I would have to use the keyboard. As I reached for the keys to bring up the Force Quit Applications window, it hit me that I have no clue what key combination to use.
In Windows, it’s the ubiquitous Ctrl-Alt-Del...a combination that has been drilled into my head since the days of PC-DOS 1.0. MS wisely continued to use it in Windows for the same general purpose, and everyone, even my mother, knows to try it when things start behaving badly. Because my Mac hardly ever crashes, I have really never used the combination of keys, and therefore hadn’t memorized them. It happens to be Option-Command-Esc, but it took me a few minutes using my iPhone browser to find them.
One of the good things about the Mac being so stable is that you don’t need the emergency key combinations often. The bad thing is that when you do, your probably don’t remember them. I think I’m going to print out this list of keyboard shortcuts and store it somewhere.
The new danger is that I won’t remember where I put it.
This being my birthday, I was able to sleep in and just sort of do nothing all day. This gave me a lot of time to read the Interwebs which is all ablaze about Apple’s $200 price drop of the iPhone.
Being both an Apple shareholder and in the “iPhone $600 club” myself, and having paid the “stupid tax”, I do have an opinion on what is now known as “the drop” (as opposed to ”the catch”).
First of all, anyone who bought the iPhone at $600 either thought it was worth $600 or returned it.
Second, early adopters always pay more for the ability to use cutting-edge technology.
Third, the price of technology, especially cutting-edge technology, drop very rapidly as the costs of mass marketing come down, and companies, in general, owe nothing to the customers that bought the product before the price drop.
So why do I feel like Apple owes me at least an apology?
Because of the time frame.
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For a very long time I got used to my average wireless performance in my apartment. In general, average for me meant 800 kb/s top download speed from a good internet site for a large file, and about 2 mb/s between computers local to my home network.
Then, about a year ago, those averages dropped once in a while. Sometimes the Internet speed would drop to a sustained 400 kb/s for an hour or two and the local speed would hover around 1 mb/s. In general, it wouldn’t happen often...or better yet, I wouldn’t notice it often because I don’t do a lot of large file transfers locally or over the Internet.
About three months ago, I started to notice that my general browsing speeds were sluggish. A few tests with dslreports confirmed that my connection was horrible.
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Earlier this year came news that Clippy, that lovable annoying paper clip that would pop up in MS Office, was being axed. Now it seems he has moved south and gotten a job at Apple. He’s included in the return box sent to people who send in their iPhone to be repaired.
Nice to see the little guy moving on with his life.
According to an analyst at Piper Jaffray, 500,000 iPhones were sold between 6pm Friday and 6pm Sunday. Furthermore, the report indicates that 95% of the iPhones sold were the 8GB ($600) model. With that info, let’s look at the numbers:
- Assuming the Piper Jaffray model ratio is correct, 475,000 8GB models were sold for a total of about $285 million, and 25,000 4GB models were sold for a total of about $12.5 million, bringing the combined total to $297.5 million.
- If we use the Piper Jaffray total of 500,000, but use the Josh Madison ratio of 60% 8GB to 40% 4GB, then 300,000 8GB models were sold for a total of $180 million, and 200,000 4GB models were sold for a total of $100 million, bringing the combined total to $280 million.
- Ratatouille, according to Box Office Mojo, brought in $47.2 million for the weekend.
Clearly, the iPhone won. Was there really any doubt?
Today is June 29th, and if you’ve been living under a rock for the last few days, today’s the day that Apple’s iPhone is unleashed upon the general public. It also happens to be the day that Disney/Pixar’s newest movie, “Ratatouille”, opens. Just to make sure that everyone understands the connection, Steve Jobs is the CEO of Apple, Inc., and he was the CEO of Pixar before Disney bought them not too long ago. Mr. Jobs is currently the largest shareholder of Disney stock.
This leads me to wonder...which of Mr. Jobs “babies” will have a bigger opening weekend in terms of dollars?
According to Box Office Mojo, the biggest opening weekend of all time is “Spider-Man 3” at just over $151 million. The biggest opening weekend for an animated movie is “Shrek the Third” at around $121.6 million. The biggest opening weekend for a Pixar animated movie is “The Incredibles” at $70.5 million.
Let’s assume that “Ratatouille” will beat “Spider-Man 3” as the largest opening weekend for a movie and will do so at $155 million (I don’t think it will, but we’re just going to use that as a round number). For the iPhone to beat $155 million, Apple/AT&T needs to sell 310,000 of the 4GB ($500) model, or 258,334 of the 8GB ($600) model. Since I suspect that the sales ratio of iPhone models will be 60% 8GB and 40% 4GB, Apple/AT&T needs to sell 155,000 of the 8GB model and 116,000 of the 4GB model, with a grand total of 271,000 combined.
Based on the line at the Apple Store on 5th Avenue, which I can now see from my office on Madison Avenue, I’d say that the iPhone will beat “Ratatouille” in the opening dollars game.
Update: Posted a wrap-up of the amount of money each made based on analysts reports.
I was cleaning and found this disk. Based on the system requirements, and the fact that it names the PCjr., I’m very sure that it’s version 2.0 from 1984 (there’s no copyright date on it). I can’t test it since I don’t have access to any 5.25” floppy drives, but I’m going to guess it won’t work.
Check out that Microsoft logo!
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I’ve been keeping track of the movies I’ve seen since 2001 in an MS SQL Sever database with a web front end built in ASP. Lately, I’ve been considering migrating it to MySQL/PHP so it can be used with this public site so I don’t have to keep updating my list of favorite movies.
I thought that a good solution might be to simply take the subset of the data that would be needed for public display and create a DTS job to transfer it nightly from the MSSQL to MySQL. I gave it a shot once, for about 30 minutes, and ran into all sorts of issues translating the data types, separators, etc. I abandoned it because it gave me a headache.
I recently took the issue back up, and decided to approach it in a slightly different way. Basically, if MS has a tool to do something, someone else probably has a tool to do the same thing and it will be easier to use and better implemented. It was with this attitude that I stumbled upon the MySQL Migration Toolkit.
In less than 15 minutes, it read the existing MSSQL database, set up all 22 tables, and transfered all 7000+ rows to MySQL, complete with indexes, auto-incrementing fields, etc., and without any errors (so far). Admittedly, it’s not a lot of data, nor is it a complicated database, but it just did a really good job.
The best part of the tool was that it explained what it was about to do, and if there were any problems with each step along the way. And it did it in plain English, which was nice, since it’s the language I’m most familiar with.
I’m just totally impressed with how easy and well done the tool and the operation was. Now I just have to port the front end from ASP to PHP, but I can start using the database right away, which is cool.
I found something the other day that’s a little annoying about the Mac. Since I only reboot once in a great while, usually when a security update forces me to, which isn’t very often, upon each reboot I am usually confronted by a lot of my software notifying me that updates are available, which causes me to spend the next little while downloading and installing said updates.
I’ve gone weeks, even months between reboots and also between application launches, and am annoyed when some applications have gone through five or more updates, mostly bug related updates, that I was not aware of.
This is not a problem with the Mac, per se, but rather with some of the automatic software checking libraries that are used. In fact, I blame lazy developers. There is a free, open source, library out there called Sparkle that a developer can add to their application to accomplish update checking, and many do. From a quick scan of the documentation, I gleamed that, by default, Sparkle checks for updates on application launch. Upon further quick glances, I further gleamed that it seems to be relatively easy for a developer to implement periodic checks, and that said periodic checks could be user configurable. The fact that some developers do not do this is just lazy.
Apple has sold 100 Million iPods. If we do the math since it was first sold at retail on November 10, 2001, that would be 1,977 days, which breaks the sales down as follows (averages based on a 24 hour day):
- 50,582 sold per day
- 2,108 sold per hour
- 35 sold per minute
- A little more than one sold every two seconds.
That’s an unbelievable amount when you really think about it. In the time it took me to write this post, more than 100 iPods were sold.
The folks over at My Dream App have hit upon a great idea. Solicit ideas about a great app from people, whittle it down to 24, then hold a contest and let the public vote on the apps they would like to see made into real applications. The top three will be written by experienced developers, and the winning contestants get royalties for their ideas.
How many great ideas for software are thought of by people who can’t write them for one reason or another? Probably tons. Now certain apps are going to be passed on because they’re not commercially viable...after all, they are in it for the money, but this is still an excellent idea to get some “new” life in shareware applications.
Right now, I’m most interested in iGTD, Hijack, and even Cookbook.
Why didn’t someone think of this sooner?
Apple, at this moment, is announcing an upgrade to Aperture. According to TUAW, it will have the following:
Aperture 1.5 has a new library system with better support for external storage, DVD’s, as well as RAID. This should make a lot of Aperture users happy. iLife integration is also new, with support for a plugins framework. Plugins for Gettyimages, iStockPhoto, Flickr are included with more on the way. The magnifying function has been improved and one can now magnifiy images up to 1600%. The XMP format is now supported for exporting image data. You can get information about a photo without the RAW file being available to Aperture (i.e. it is on a disconnected external device).
The support for external storage is huge. What good is having a photo library app if you can’t have most of the library offline?
1600% magnification? Might just be a bit of overkill, but if you’re going to do something, do it big!
XMP format support is nice. Those sidecar’s are important for application interop. Apple isn’t the only kid on the block, you know.
This 0.35 bump is nice. Shows that Apple is still improving it, but makes me hungry for v2.
The full list of improvements can be found at Apple’s Aperture site.
Adobe announced the public beta 4 of their new Lightroom product, and also clarified the name...going forward, it will be known as “Adobe Photoshop Lightroom”. Makes sense to stick “Photoshop” in there somewhere since it’s the best known photo editing app, and has even started to become a verb to the general population (make sure you see Adobe’s Permissions and Trademark Guidelines for proper usage). They have really enhanced the UI on it by generally prettying it up, but more importantly, they improved the following items, which I thought needed to be done before it could be a useful product.
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