No wonder the introduction of “mobileMe” was such a disaster. I, like most people, have registrations with many websites. From pointless things to online banking. Even though there is no official or firm standard for registration on websites certain practises emerged. And overall things work.
With one exception:
Apple.
Their web site registration mechanism for developers is broken. Not by one main outage or problem. More in the million paper cuts kind of way.
* passwords expire
* passwords have odd ’security’ restrictions. Of course you have to try a password to see that the system complains about something
* loging in to one part of the system does NOT mean that you have access to another, or that you just changed password would be working there.
Apples own website is pretty dismal overall, once you go beyond the home and apple store pages: Broken links clutter the whole thing. Links that go nowhere are an inherent problem of the internet. But having them within a company website is just lame. A million paper cuts. Not fun to repeat each one of them. But the mobileMe disaster did not come not as a surprise.
Other areas of Apple are vastly ahead of the game and the competition. The internet is certainly not one of them.
I got an officially looking letter from the “Board of Business complicance” asking $125 ‘due now’. I was about to ask my Tax people about this. But then it turned out that entering it in google already fixes the issue. Just by reading the excerpt made it cleart this is a scam. 30 seconds later I found a concise legal summary about this scam citing California Corporations Code Sec. 1500 600, 9510.
Done. Scam attempt goes in the shredder. The upside is how fast this did go. How effortless scamers can be dwarfed. Still bad that people can be in business ripping people off.
Used a different credit card. And it turns out that the exchange rate applied is by 5% worse than that of the other cards. This is one of these things where maybe after 30 minutes I could find the rate applied on the banks website. Or maybe not. My strategy for this kind of gotcha-capitalism is different: I have a list of companies that pulled a fast one on me. I try to avoid doing business with them as much as possible.
Gotcha Capitalism dilutes the whole system that got us here in the first place. Buyers selecting the best offer were the driving force for all progress. If buyers become mere ‘confused consumers’ they will buy all sorts of crap. And things offered will quickly deteriorate in quality, since the pressure to do a good job is gone.
Over time clear decisions haves seemingly become the sole territory of spin, bias and hype. The normal and actually working concept of looking at the situation and then coming up with a clear decision and sticking to it has apparently gone out of fashion. Since people could afford not pay attention allot of things grew into big business that make no sense whatsforever in clear day light. They simply thrive on peoples ignorance. And on the fact that they could afford not to pay attention.
INTERDUBS does not charge for storage. No matter how many Gigabytes you need, it is included in the $285 flat rate. Since there is no financial incentive to clean up, some of my customers amassed quiet a backlog of material.
Which actually was somewhat intended: Other tools were more important than the means to clean up and keep the data pool fresh. With Terrabytes stored -and much of it actually no longer needed- this situation changed. Adding tools to simplify clean up was easy. The database had already all needed information.
Getting people to use them was a different matter though. Somehow I got lucky and had what turned out to be the right idea: Between Sunday and yesterday I had a ‘cleanup drive’ in INTERDUBS. Clients with allot of old material were encouraged to delete as much as possible of it. As an incentive INTERDUBS donates to charity relative to the amount of Gigabytes cleaned up.
And it actually worked rather well: People put in allot of work to clean up their backlog of material, and they did so knowing that it was for a good cause.
In total INTERDUBS will pay for 240 vaccinations.
This little detail is also nice, since I had no idea that this solution would emerge when I decided not to charge for storage. If I can continue to run a flat rate based on the efforts like this then I will be very happy.
"We have trade missions back and forth, we do" said Palin. "It's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia. As Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America, where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there, they are right next to our state. "
So the current one could not talk straight. But people wanted him anyway. twice. Or maybe 1.5 times. Turns out that running the country on stupidity got us in the biggest bubble ever. The US / Russian relationship is still the one with the most potential for danger. Hearing this women talk like this about it is scary. With the dumb president people thought / hoped that the VP would take care of things. He might even have. Who knows. This women could technically run the show.
That is scary.
Bush running things was scary. And we see now how much they let things slide in the wrong direction. This bubble is Bush made. It got created by turning the interest rate screw in the wrong direction for to long. Simple as that. A more intelligent administration could have avoided this problem quiet easily from building. Just don’t let the housing prices inflate that much. Interest rates are controlled by the fed. Carefully raising them would have cost a couple of fractions in growth. Maybe. But it would kept the system in the healthy zone, not where we are right now.
In a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey out Monday afternoon, 47 percent of registered voters questioned said Republicans are more responsible for the problems currently facing financial institutions and the stock market; only 24 percent said Democrats are more responsible.
That means that 47% of all registered voters actually know which party ran the country in the last 8 years. Only one in four people is confused about that. Amazing.
I wonder how many would answer “Clinton” or “Carter” if asked who was President on September 11 2001.
Listening to Mr McCain it seems that the US got a 3 party system overnight: There are the democrats, his party, and then the one that is in power now and that is responsible for all that mess that he can not deny either.
I am amazed to no extend that this kind of orwellian reality bending has a realistic chance of maybe even working out.
At least they spare us with the orange alerts in this election cycle. Those were are big deal in 2004. At least in the media they took allot of room.
I had not heard of the monome before. I saw one today and it looks very nice. Could be so much fun. If I’d had the time + skills for it. Still a pretty awesome device.
It turns out that Google has fogiven twexus.com for its past sins. The site exists again according to Google. I forgot when the ban started. It was certainly justified back in the day. Long story. Anyway, now it is google-legal again. With a cute little page-rank of 3 even.
In honor of this I bumped the image resolution of its pair play mode up by a notch. Screens got bigger since 2002.
For the longest time I ran Firefox 1.5. 2.0 had nothing to offer and from what I heard was a real dog. Finally I switched my main browser over to 3.0 and it has been a nice experience. I love those little things. Like asking if you like to save a password AFTER you entered it (and therefor know if it worked or not). While FF3 seems to be worth it I have serious doubts about Safari 3.0. So many things behave now somewhat different. Quirkier. Surprisingly FF3 plays for instance much nicer with Quicktime than Safari 3 in many cases. One would expect the opposite. It might just be that Apple engineers test all sites that they know their boss will visit. Outside of that the importance probably falls off pretty quickly. I am sure that His Steveness thinks that the thing ’scrolls like butter’. It probably does. For him. I wonder if his switch to MobileMe went well …
Got refurb iPod nanos from Apple for the kids. $99. Tooble is a somewhat buggy but overal working application that will get youtube videos and put them into iTunes and therefor the nanos. Handbrake takes care of DVDs and works actually much better. Overall it is pretty impressive with how little effort, config and engineering I was able to give my kids all the music videos that I thought would be interesting. Quality is dismal, but I heard no complaints.
while burning in a new machine with a 3ware 9560 adapter I got twice the following error messages:
kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: WARNING Character ioctl (0x108) timed out, resetting card.
kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: AEN: INFO Cache synchronization completed:unit=0.
Looking at the source it seems that 0×108 is TW_IOCTL_FIRMWARE_PASS_THROUGH
I had these errors only when smartd was configured to probe the drives on the 3ware card. This was under max load
during the burn in of the array. Not sure if there were any other errors etc. It seemed harmless enough, but then again
no errors are better than spurious warning etc. Once I have a couple of days of a clean running machine I probably will
turn smartd on again to see if the connection indeed exists.
DVDs are cheap. They can be. I picked up the habbit to have lots of unwatched DVDs around. My very own Netflix. With the upside that I get to pick from 50 unwatched DVDs one that I feel like and watch it right away. Last night I watched ‘Lolita’. Funny how black and white can feel more real than color flicks. Maybe it’s because color in movies was always exagerated. Pleasing to look at, but hardly a truthful representation of reality. Black and white does not even try to be real.
To contrast that long Kubrick flick I watched “Something Wild” today. Actually it was much better than I remembered it. Maybe I should write a web application that picks up all 48 tracks from the soundtrack and buys them via AmazonMP3. For about 30 seconds they fade in and out to “Pili Pili” by Jasper van’t Hof in the movie. It’s 15:44. iTunes wants only to give it to you if you buy the entire album for $11. Amazon has it for 99 cents. The way it should be. Actually I will be buying mp3s now from Amazon. Having no DRM is how things should be. Collecting DVDs is nice. Specially since they are no longer hindered by DRM. Being able to get music right away, and actually have the file and not some DRM-locked-crap is really nice. I guess I like collecting things.
By far the worst online user management is done by apple. I felt I could use an Airport Express. But I did not feel dealing with Apple’s broken password management yet again. iTunes kinda works most of the time. But their developer connection and online stores are plain pathetic. I am sure it works for Apple employees, and Apple devotees maybe get even a kick out of the interaction with their beloved brand. But I have better things to do. Like buying stuff on Amazon.
The other day a colleague observed me wrangling some obscure firewall / ftp issue that came up for one of my clients. Once I had fixed the problem he proclaimed: “you really leave no bug behind”. I like that expression. It matches what I am trying to do with INTERDUBS. Actually so far each bug got fixed twenty four hours after it had been reported. Other feature wishes can take longer to get implemented: Some people had to wait months before they could create reels via drag and drop.
The ‘all bugs get fixed right away’ mantra has a huge benefit: Low support efforts. Actually I carefully evaluate each support call / email to see if the software / documentation could have helped with this. I sure don’t mind talking to my clients, but I agree with Don Norman that products need to designed so that they work with their users as well as they possibly can.
The question is provocative, the underlying mechanism interesting. His conclusions seem predictive and not very helpful I am afraid. Reading the title I hoped for the wrong article. One that would illuminate and much more interesting question: “How does google change the way we think”. It certainly does. I am amazed how quickly I find myself forgetting things. It was worrying at first. After all I make a living based on the application of knowledge. The foundation of knowledge was being able to remember things. I say was. And -actually- I think it is quiet ok.
The apparent loss of memory was frightening when I observed how I would google for things again and again. The nicest anecdote I mention frequently: Reading my own blog without noticing that I am fixing an issue following a recipe that I wrote myself.
Nowadays I think that my brain just realized that it is a waste of time to compete with the internet and google as it’s access if it comes to all those mundane details that make up my job. Once a decent phone book function comes along (be it as a book or function of the phones software) we quickly forget most numbers we used to be able to remember. Just how it goes.
With a MacBook you pay around 50 extra to get it in black. Now with the iPhone 3G there will be a white version. But that will only be available for the larger 16GB version. I never ever have filled up the 4GB I had. So you have two choices now with the iPhone 3G: pay too much because you can and don’t show people (get the black one) or let people know that you don’t need to care about the extra 100. The new price of 199 is pretty low, compared to last years launch. But I would guess that the 20$ a month extra for 24 months rule is still in place. You pay AT&T or whomever, but you pay. That’s 480 dollars extra that any iPhone will cost you. So the price started out at 1079 for the 8GB / 979 for the 4GB and now has arrived at 879 / 779 respectively.
Turns out that the data plan is now $30 and not $20 any longer. So the total price for an iPhone2 is $1019 / $919.
Funny how Apple sometimes ‘fixes’ things by giving the remedy a new name:
Under 10.4 the ‘fancy’ cache would go made quiet frequently. Basically you’d see the wrong web page, while other commands like
ping etc still reach the proper server.
sudo lookupd flushcache
used to fix that. Of course the bug has not been fixed in 10.5.2 but the remedy is called now:
Today Interdubs crossed the 80K file mark. 59 days for 20,000 more files. Last time it took 83 days to grow that much, and before that 118. Something seems to be working here.
What makes me even happier is to hear the following from a new client: “you must have worked in our field for a while”. That would be true, and it delights me that it seems to show in the application. Intentions are one thing. Seing that they apparently manifested themselves at least somewhat is very rewarding.
It turns out that I was wrong then I thought I was wrong about the Next-Gen of movies on a disc: Blu-Ray sales declined. Bluray might become the first class of enteraintment: Coach has many more seats that 1st. Specially on inner american flights.
Years ago when both Microsoft and Apple decided what to put into their next operating systems they had to look into the future. Picking arbritrary one from each company makes for an interesting comparison: Vista got a feature where a memory stick could be used by the operating system to speed things up. Harddrives are 10,000 times slower than memory. USB2 still 10 to 40 times faster than most drivers. Makes allot of sense. It is probably a very tricky thing to implement: the user can remove the stick at any time, and things still need to work. Trouble is: Internal memory got dirt cheap. So a complicated and expensive idea that has no future net gain.
Compare that to “TimeMachine”. The actual concept of a backup is nothing new or innovative at all. But Time Machine makes it possible that people back up easily. External drives are inexpensive and easy to use. Makes 100% sense. The TimeCapsule rip off lets show apples dark side again. But at least they did not extend it to normal drives. The value of a working backup is huge. Once people have stories to tell that TimeMachine saved their Live they are sold for good and forever to run only Macs. Maybe if hey will backup to Memory Sticks in the future …
minutes after raving about the current Spotlight install TimeMachine throws a fit. It is actually pretty stupid. From my syslog:
Apr 29 08:40:09 99-204-104-71 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[3731]: Starting standard backup
Apr 29 08:40:09 99-204-104-71 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[3731]: Backing up to: /Volumes/300GB/Backups.backupdb
Apr 29 08:40:18 99-204-104-71 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[3731]: No pre-backup thinning needed: 58.48 GB requested (including padding), 184.42 GB available
Apr 29 08:40:18 99-204-104-71 mds[33]: (/Volumes/300GB/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/8564E2D8-9D41-40A3-8681-0D515BC688F3)(Error) IndexCI in ContentIndexAddOids:Caught mach exception. Fun Fun Fun.
Apr 29 08:41:18 99-204-104-71 login[3737]: USER_PROCESS: 3737 ttys001
Apr 29 08:41:51 99-204-104-71 mds[33]: (/Volumes/300GB/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/8564E2D8-9D41-40A3-8681-0D515BC688F3)(Error) IndexGeneral in notify_lowspace:low space for device 234881029 (/Vol
umes/300GB/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/8564E2D8-9D41-40A3-8681-0D515BC688F3)
Apr 29 08:41:51 99-204-104-71 mds[33]: (Error) Volume: LOW DISK SPACE device:234881029
Apr 29 09:29:18 99-204-104-71 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[3731]: Error: Flushing index to disk returned an error: -916
Apr 29 09:29:18 99-204-104-71 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[3731]: Copied 27544 files (48.3 GB) from volume 232.
Apr 29 09:29:26 99-204-104-71 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[3731]: No pre-backup thinning needed: 471.6 MB requested (including padding), 135.99 GB available
Apr 29 09:29:26 99-204-104-71 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[3731]: Waiting for index to be ready (915 > 0)
...
Apr 29 09:35:41 99-204-104-71 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[3731]: Waiting for index to be ready (915 > 0)
last line looping forever, so I stopped it and got:
in a terminal window will list all purchased music. Apple did with Spotlight what Microsoft was known for in the 90s: Releasing a great concept. Hardly working / usable in it’s first Version, but then getting it right in the later updates. Spotlight is actually quiet useful under OS X 10.5.