Andreas Wacker

ah, the wonders of technology:

EVDO has been around for a little while. Verizon was first, now there is also Sprint. Which has supposed to have the faster Rev.A variant. Without having a voice account with either Sprint runs at 60 while Verizon is 80. Unfortunately Mac OS X support is much smoother better (as in existing) for Verizon. Enter: The internet. And a bit of google.

I decided to get the Sprint USB modem called Ovation U720. Since in all cases there is something sticking out of the laptop I might as well have something that runs on all my laptops. The first nice surprise was that the person in the store told me outright that Mac support is not existing right now. I like that kind of honesty much more than the usual “yeah-yeah” attitude that sells things that then cause troubles and head aches.

I installed the software from the CD onto a PC that was flying around. It took a while, and I realised that PC installers are still the same eye soar that they used to be. After clicking through all the defaults, ignoring a couple of stuck progress bars and all that it the device was activated. The booklet that comes with it talked about calling some phone number. Was not needed in my case. I already had received the 6 digit lock code and the 2 phone number like mon and msid numbers from the sales person at sprint. It took a while, failed here and there, and then said it had activated the connection. Claiming that it would be ready in 4 hours to use. Of course nobody can wait that long. Clicking again on the icon showed me that the USB modem indeed was happily connecting to sprint.

I downloaded the novatel720.dmg.zip (here it’s on my server: http://www.andreaswacker.com/Novatel720.dmg.zip ) and installed it. Rebooted,
and entered the info as outlined in this forum

twexus @ appartment therapy

nice. that the work still makes sense after 4 years. Which is probably a long time for an internet art site.

BlogsNow pointed out that it has been 40 years since the Apollo-1 incident.

I just looked at the download speeds of interdubs and am surprised, and then again, not surprised how many people have fast connections these days. And how many actually have really really fast connection. It looks that fios is a big hit for the people that use interdubs from the client side. And a couple of bigger companies have indeed pipes that are as wide as you would think they are. It must be an interesting experience to use the internet with 45Mbit: Lot’s of slower sites and some that are pleasantly fast. Nice that interdubs is one of them. Very nice actualy.

To find which rpm provided the file example you simply enter:


rpm -qf /path/to/example


Tomorrow we will talk again about “Zodiac”.

David Green asks:

“But will it beachball”

Crispen Porter and DD camp out in the uncanny valley

some better coverage at stash.tv

If I would be Michael Bay I would be worried.

Here how people reacted to it:
(random, unbiased sampling, there simple was no single positive voice, except of the the press release that the makers pushed)

just creepy
it doesn’t get more unoriginal than this lifeless horror sequel
To me, it looks more like Dana Carvey made up to look like an old man.
freaky
grotesque
“kinda creepy” doesn’t do a thing for my appetite
It’s a desiccated undead zombie-mummy in a bowtie, and it will steal your soul.
.This is so horrifying, it makes me want to hide under my desk
It was so completely believable that I threw out all our popcorn so that zombie Orville wouldn’t tempted to visit.

stupid song, nice video:

Macworld was OK. I was surprised how small it is. And how few interesting things I found. SF showed itself from it’s best side. It was sunny and I was able to walk to every place I needed to go. What a concept!

The talk on the LA Final Cut User Group Meeting went ok. It was a very pleasant and interested audience. Which made it worthwhile. I will post the material I talked about once it is in presentable form. Rebecca Ross wrote a very nice article about the event.

Post wrote an article about the Zodiac workflow earlier this year.

Walking Wilshire Blvd. What a neat idea to celebrate 10 years of LA. My ten year ‘anniversary’ was November 1st 2006. Should have done something.

I am looking for an asterisk person that knows it well enough to help to set a system up for a 50 people company (could be 100 soon). The lease is signed. Los Angeles. Please pass it on.

It’s here: SONY’s response to the iMac. The Lamp like iMac G4 that is. Released exactly 5 years and one day ago.

The dutch are very nice people. They telco “kpn” however sucks. Sucks. As, to be precise. They have hotspots. That would be cool. They ride on this craze that you have to pay money for wifi. OK. That usually is a bad idea, as long as companies want this privilige exclusively. The KPN login screen is the most obscure login form I have encountered. Keys are being remapped. Worst of all: In Firefox on OS X you are prompted with a blank screen when you credit card info is supposed to go through. Nothing happened. For minutes. I then tried Safari, which was pretending to work. Of course new windows popped up and all that other javascript nonsense was still there. After fifteen minutes KPN then charged the firefox trans action it seemed, even though the firfox window never showed a page. So now I spend twice as much for a crappy connection.

I hope that we get quickly to the phase where there will be competitng systems for wifi access everywhere. That would take care of a cheap and stupid hack like KPNs wifi access within weeks.

Update:
A little bit later I at least could use the KPN hot spot extra minutes that they shoved down my throat and took my money for while waiting for the 747 to get ready. I thought I keep some minutes for later. But they managed for they pop up that allows you to logout not to show up when you use the wifi at the airport. Worked in the hotel. Once you have a bunch of looser code something it really all starts to suck. What a poor showing. I simple have to use up the extra KPN minutes now. It’s only a couple of Euros. But still a rip off. It’s a rip by stupidity, not even intended. KPN is clueless about what they are offering. They fell for a moron coder, and they have no way of telling, since they never use their own product and ignore customer feedback.


So far botnets have predominantly infected Windows-based computers, although there have been scattered reports of botnet-related attacks on computers running the Linux and Macintosh operating systems.


That’s the NY Times being clueless about Botnets. Good that they write about it. As it is a problem.
Bad that they write so badly about it. The author seems to like ot cover his bases here. “Scattered reports”? God, there are scattered reports about Ant’s playing doom in mongolia. This is as covering. Not more. The reality is that 100% of all botnets are run on Windows machines. There are still no Viruses for OS X. There are MS Office infections that affect the OS X flavor of the product. But the Operating system has been save.

It’s as binary as that. Don’t get me wrong: Apple sucks in some areas. But their OS has had no real life virus infections. People seem to shy away from such binary truths. Easier to throw in a ’scattered reports’ here and there. Pseudo Balance. It’s actually much more harmful than it seems: It leaves loopholes. It kills the truth: Somebody with an intention could quote now the New York Times that there have been Botnets on Linux and OS X. Which is a lie. Not true. The big question that needs a real answer is, if Vista can join the club of predomiantly safe operating systems or not. Unfortunately journalists will not help in finding this out.

The only real weapon against malware is the truth.
Too bad that the New York Times is too afraid to avoid it.

Kottke’s link collection for 2007
Lot’s and lot’s ‘copy/download and read later’ items. For me at least.

continue to go badly:

Sony, specifically PS3
Iraq, tied to it the current US administration
next gen DVD formats (HD-DVD and blu-ray)
Yahoo
Microsoft
GM, Ford and Chrysler

continue to do well:

Google
Apple
Toyota