Category Archives: tech

Lines, Lines, . . . or Not

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There is a television ad for Galaxy S3 (I think) that is all about the iPhone lines, and the hours that people wait in them.  When you’re ad is mostly about the opponent, you’re losing.

Apple announces a new product, and there will be tens of thousands of people waiting in lines to get it.

Meanwhile, Microsoft pays to promote a tweet to convince a hundred people to show up for the release of the new surface.  $99 of Xbox Music Pass.  I guess that’s a thing; I haven’t heard of it.

 

Embeds – WordPress 3.4

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I noticed that the new WordPress update automatically creates embedded content for several sites.  It actually started in 2.9, but Twitter was added with this version.  All you have to do is include the link by itself on a line.

Bill Coin

It will make it much easier to steal Jay Lee’s content.  (Actually, i’m sure it links back to the original, which is all he wishes for in a non-commercial setting.)

Also, you can include hyperbolic tweets and make fun of them while nicely formatted:

Kill the 2WIRE – Renaming your U-verse Router

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AT&T U-verse modems all come pre-installed with default names (2WIRE123) and default passwords (10 digits).  That is boring, and not easy to remember.  Picking your router from all your sheep neighbors can be difficult if your urban density is high, and the 10 digits are not the ones you need.

If you connect your computer to the modem directly with an ethernet cable, you can manipulate these things.  There is a default IP address for ALL routers.  If they’ve politely implemented it, you can access it at http://192.168.1.254/ – though there are other addresses used by different manufacturers.  The U-verse modems have a quite nice interface to manipulate the settings. (I’ve recently found that http://gateway.2wire.net/ might get caught by the modem as well.)

Continue reading →

NeXTSTEP, It’s on your iPhone

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In the years between Apple and Apple, Steve Jobs created a company that created iOS.

That’s a gross summary.

Steve Jobs died last year. Most obituaries mentioned his hiatus company. Yet you still didn’t know what it was in the title of this post.  NeXT, the company, was founded in 1988.  I bought one (#16469) of their initial computers in 1990. I finally got a job that was using it in 1992. I loved it.

The Unix-underneath, Objective-C-on-top operating system with forward technologies and rich development tool sets was a wonder to work on, and a joy in many business custom development environments I found myself in the following years: WilTel (The Woodlands), Pan Canadian Petroleum (Calgary), Fannie Mae (Washington).

NeXTSTEP morphed into OpenStep, and the huge issue of cross-platform porting was mastered by NeXT.  Soon Apple hired Jobs back, and with him the OS.  I was personally injured when they skinned it and put on a Macintosh body suit, but it was the right business decision.

They convinced all the Macintosh “operating system” users (i’m a Unix/real OS bigot) to convert over to the Unix-OS, OpenStep became OS X.  I missed my pegged dock. I was annoyed by the constant main menu.  I wanted to tear off menus. But I could feel the soul of the Old Lady underneath.

Then they basically ported the operating system they run on 15 pound towers, whirring with fans to run on a tiny touch screen you could use as a phone.  It’s still mostly there. Most of it’s been rewritten more than once. (That’s what NeXT/Apple does so well!)

When the iPhone SDK was released I started working with it.  The user interface toolkit was reimplemented from scratch. Many of the issues we’d fed back to NeXT developers in the early 90s were reflected in design and implementation changes. (There were, of course, new issues.  That’s what happens with software.)

I have to touch many parts of technology. Most of them are less elegant than iOS. But you’ve got to do it.

I credit the elegance of design and implementation of NeXTSTEP with the fact that it is basically running on your phone. Welcome to my favorite operating system of the 90s.

Drive Me Home, Car

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Wired Magazine had a very interesting article about the current activity in driving automation.  Written by Tom Vanderbilt, it reviews the large leaps that have been made in the field in the past decade.  It’s amazing that we really are so close, so much that it will be a legislative problem over the coming decade to catch up with the state of the technology.

On a week that my mother bought what she expects to be the last car she owns, not expecting to be allowed to drive (by me) after she’s 80, it looks like she might be able to buy a car that (mostly if not entirely) drives for her by that time.

Reading over the article, which is quite long, thorough, and awesome, I had several thoughts on the future of the technology and implications.

Stop n’ Go Traffic

I was reminded this week of an awesome example of the emergent nature of stop n’ go traffic in a non-bottleneck/accident environment.  A video of a circle of cars that begin equal spaced but because the nature of humans begins to undulate.

One would hope that the automation of driving would put an end to the annoying of such.  Prediction 1: I think it won’t (without legislative force or technical cooperation).  I suspect that the varying granulation of the differing softwares among cars, and also likely setting of comfortable follow distances will cause the same emergent fluctuation of speeds.  The best way to counter this, in my opinion, would be to recognize a stop n’ go situation and limit the allowed acceleration after a slow down.  Just a critical mass of cars taking that approach could cause the behavior to not manifest. Continue reading →

Out With the Old (Computer Files)

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I decided to perform a bunch of routine maintenance on my computer in preparation for installing the new OS update: Lion. I had already started downloading the 4th beta release of the iOS tools, and that was taking hours.  So, when that finally finished, I moved upstairs to connect my backup drive to the computer to sync the backups before I installed a new OS.

My backup drive has been filling up and deleting old backs lately.  Not really a problem, but it slows down backups.  So, I checked to see if there was anything I could clean off of there.  I noticed 3 and 4 year old backups of an older computer that I have already migrated important stuff off of (and now just runs my TV).  So, I “moved the files to the trashcan” which doesn’t actually delete files off a disk, then “emptied the trash” which does.

An hour and a half later I was still watching it count the files (350,000 at that point), it was well past midnight, i went to bed.  I checked and realized it was a 1 TB drive, so it definitely had lots of stuff that could be removed.  Upon awaking, it was still counting, but luckily finished soon thereafter.  Ending at 3, 696, 106 files to be deleted.  I know because it stopped to warn me that some of the files were locked and asked if those should be deleted.

So, it started actually deleting them sometime after 10am and finished a bit before 7pm.  (114 files deleted per second)  Freed up about 400GB on my 1TB drive.  Or if you include the accounting before the deleting 1am – 7pm = 20 hours (52 files a second).

In the mean time I took my jar of change to the grocery store, dumped it all into the Coinstar machine and ended up with a $24.01 credit for the iTunes store – that’ll mostly pay for the $30 OS X Lion upgrade and it cleaned out my change jar.  One über-corroded penny rejected.

Takeaway: i need to do maintenance on the backup disk more often.

p.s. i googled “terabyte” to see what the most odd image i could find – that’s the one above.  Available as wallpaper, a hoodie, and a mug, just click on the image.

p.p.s. “hoodie” so hipster my spellcheck doesn’t know it