Andreas Wacker

wanting to check out a free application for the iPad I had to go through the following motion:

1) tapping in search of iTunes store makes it crash. No message whatsforever. Just vanishes.

2) wondering if that is related to the fact that there are pending updates, so doing those

3) iTunes Store still crashes tapping into search.

4) cold reboot fixes sudden store crash. Can locate the app.

5) trying to download I need to sign in. Fair enough.

6) trying to download, but something has changed with the CC. It has not, but hell if Apple thinks so.

7) trying to download, but NO I have to pick a a salutation

8) trying to download, but NO, the terms have changed and I have to agree to them.

9) trying to download a free app, and -imagine that- it does download. Less than 10 attempts! to get something simple going.

Steve Jobs said at this years D8 conference:


When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks because
that’s what you needed on the farms.” Cars became more popular
s cities rose, and things like power steering and automatic
transmission became popular.

“PCs are going to be like trucks,” Jobs said.
“They are still going to be around.” However, he said,
only “one out of x people will need them.”


I agree on the part that iPad like devices will liberate
people from using computers that didn’t want them in
the first place. And there are more than we think.
I think Apple will make a killing by recognizing this with
the iPad.

I like the historical analogy. However I find this one
to be more fitting: Computers are like kitchens, and
iPads are like micro wave ovens. A microwave will
work against your hunger. You are dependent on
pre made things that you have to purchase at a price.
It is easy, but you have not much chance to control
the experience.

A kitchen is more complex to operate than a microwave.
But the food tastes better. It is healthier and cheaper.
And the varieties of experiences is endless.

An Apple TV box stopped reacting to the IR when being back in the Apple interface. The light was still changing colors when a button was pressed, but nothing happened. This forum post describes perfectly shows how to get the IR working again. Since it would be a shame if these clear and wonderful instructions would fall prey to data rot here a (slightly amended) copy of them:

1) if you have not already, patchstick the ATV

2) ssh to the atv

(Steps 3 and 4 will fail if you have set the ATV to not auto update its software, since mesu.apple.com will resolve to 127.0.0.1)
3) download the IR firmware update utility: wget http://mesu.apple.com/data/IR/061-3045.20080708.Aq12D/IRReceiverUpdaterTool2

4) download the firmware image: wget http://mesu.apple.com/data/IR/694-5586.20081119.2AvT3/irrxfw-0×0312.irrxfw

(you probably will need to do chmod +x IRReceiverUpdaterTool2)
5) run the firmware patch: ./IRReceiverUpdaterTool2 irrxfw-0×0312.irrxfw

6) if the process worked you should see this message near the end of the output:

Flash Image Verification Succeeded…
SendCmdExitBootLoader
Bootload Success…

At his point the IR indicator blinks yellow. The Apple UI is reacting again. With
an ATV software Version 3.0.2 on a Geforce Go 7300 1GHz ATV the IR became
inoperable after a reboot.

Redoing the update, then unpairing the remote and pairing it again fixed this.

On a side note: I found this blog post 20 minutes after I made it when googling for ‘IRReceiverUpdaterTool2′.

Google is simply amazing.

Apple published a “Thoughts on Flash”. The piece is amazingly well crafted and written. The real reason for Apples bold move attempting to keep flash out of the mobile space only shines through. If Flash would become the engine for mobile, then applications could run on Apple and other devices. A mobile software eco system would grow outside of the Apple space.

Apple realizes the potential of preventing this. Out of the box the iPad can NOT do any of the following:

= perform as a calculator
= perform as an alarm clock
= read PDFs

Yes, I am sure, ‘there is an app for that’. Which is the model of the device. And in order to create software for this you have to adhere to Apples programming standards (objective C) and use their distribution channels. They are in control. Letting flash grow in this space would not allow them to control this.

For Apple this makes perfect sense. And it is amazing that they had vision that they would be able to dethrone a system that always could claim greater than ninety percent proliferation.

After a couple of days with OS X 10.6 aka Snow Leopard I have to say that it is not worth bothering with. It breaks things. Nothing major, but there are no rewards for that hassle. ZFS would have been nice, but it is not there. Applications that would use more than 2/3/4 Gigabytes of memory would have been nice. But even the recently updated FinalCut is using 64bit yet to address this much memory.

All those glorious changes under the hood? Well, all I notice were the things that are broken. I am so glad that I kept my main machines at 10.5

Couldn’t read the keyboard under the current lighting conditions. And manual controls for changing it did not work. Enter: Lab Tick.

45 seconds later it’s all good again. Very nice when stuff just works.

an OS X server got unhappy and seemingly did hang on bootup on the gray screen with the rotating ‘progress’ indicating.

Booting it with text mode enabled (holding command V) revealed that the machine would loop with the following error message snippets:


posix_spawnp ... /usr/sbin/mDNSresponder ... no such file or directory

ls -lsd /
0 drwxrwxr-t 43 root admin 1530 Dec 20 03:57 /

Booting into single mode (command -s) and then doing the suggested fsck and mount -uw / revealed that the permissions actually were set to:


drwwrx---


Meaning that others have not even read permissions. This makes the mDNSresponder seemingly unhappy. I would guess that it quickly gives away its root privileges after launch for security reason. Running what the internet suggested


chmod 775 /


did fix the issue.

I have no idea why, and it os most likely me. But traveling with the same user to another laptop .exrc stopped being looked at for vi. Strange. .vimrc still works. So I put my settings in there and continued to work. Not sure what’s going on. Not time to investigate.

So now I am on laptop number 5 ( Titanium, 12″ G4, 15″ G4, iBook G4, 15″ first gen Macbook Pro) and I am considering to get a second one to put it away so that I can keep on using this kind of machine once I have worn this one out. Storing a computer for 4 years before you use it for the first time is a stupid thing. I still consider it. Apple might have peaked with this machine.

I got a refurb Al 17″ (pre unibody) and it works like a dream. It’s non glossy 1920×1200 screen is gorgeous. Hey even the trackpad works, and the keyboard is a match to the fingers. All things I didn’t like about the unibody flavor. And the price is pretty sweet for a 4GB Ram (nice one) 300GB drive machine I paid $2100.

Being able to drive a 30″ screen and the better sound of the built in speakers are other benefits that I did not consider but certainly appreciate. And the thing is cool. The 15″ was heating my fingers. But only when it was cold. I hope this gfx card lasts longer than the one in the machine before.

Just a few weeks ago I bought iWork08. It would cost me another $100 to get the recent iWork09. That ‘Numbers’ is pointless I already realized. I hear keynote is alright, have not used it. I just tried to use Pages. Again. Making something as fancy as a ‘table’. Oh, boy! Annoying and stupid. But then I wanted to enter “99.999%”. The INTERDUBS uptime. Leaving the input focus of that field “Pages” decided to change that it to “100%”. No, really. Kid you not. Had to do it thrice to believe it. I am sure there might be some preference somewhere. But Pages has wasted enough of my time already. Amazon is shipping Mac office any day now. I can wait for that. Waiting happily to use a Microsoft software. What has the world come too!!

When a program crashes under OS X then it displays a dialog asking if the info should be sent to Apple. If you never do that then you can disable this dialog by typing:


defaults write com.apple.CrashReporter DialogType Server


in a terminal shell. So says the C’t.

I am an casual office software user. I write things in vi or text edit. And yes, that’s how they sound. I never was that big in to spread sheets. But graphing solutions I need. I had written my own things for SGI, but even though OS X is OpenGL as well, it is just too much work to maintain.

Since my kids now start using office software I thought I’d get them iWork. Big mistake. Pages is ok (compared to vi and text edit). Numbers however is just outright lame. I hate the fact that Apple is able to pretend that this pile of junk is software that you can make an attempt to sell. Trying to graph anything in this turd of a bloatware reveals how 0.5 ass this thing is. The problem is that crappy software is worth negative money: It took me hours to figure out that it was actual this ’spreadsheet application’ that was just unable to do even simple tasks.
“Numbers” has no understanding of time. I will download now Mac Office 2008. Which is even reasonably priced these days. Looking forward to use Microsoft software. How weird is that!

Apple makes awesome products. Since years I spend most of my waking hours on their respective recent laptops. That part works so well. The iPhone is alright. I had better phones that worked much better as a phone. But that might be AT&Ts issue. And it kinda works.

Apples online user management is ridicolous though. I keep lots of passwords to lots of sites. And nowhere do I have the amount of trouble that Apple gives me. It never is clear if their different services share the same credentials. Changing / retrieving it is a nightmare. The whole user experience is just broken. I think that happens if you have one part of your business doing really well: You can afford to be sloppy in another. And I am sure that Steve never has to reset his password. And many people are having trouble managing their passwords. So they will not blame Apple for their broken system. I can, since things work on all other major sites and system for me. But not in Apple Land.

I never was intrigued by .mac and so I skipped looking at MobileMe. Which turned out to be a good thing. I wonder if Apple will be able to turn this around. But looking at their websites and it’s vast collection of broken links and outdated developer documentation I have serious doubts that this will be ever better.

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.

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.

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.

June 29th 2007: Apple releases the iPhone

August 8th 2007: INTERDUBS supports the iPhone

June 17th 2008: Beam.TV launches mode to support the iPhone.

As for all others companies in the space: Nothing. Yet.

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:


dscacheutil -flushcache


Probably the only music video that starts out in OS X 10.4 and ends in 10.5:

Or -to say it better- the only one where it’s that apparent.

We have indeed come a long since theCMX 600

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

last line looping forever, so I stopped it and got:


Apr 29 09:46:08 99-204-104-71 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[3731]: Copied 0 files (0 bytes) from volume 232.
Apr 29 09:46:08 99-204-104-71 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[3731]: Backup canceled.


A while back people sold music with DRM. Don’t ask. It turns out that it is terribly easy to find these files:


mdfind kMDItemContentType == com.apple.protected-mpeg-4-audio


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.

Installed 10.5 today. Actually 10.5.2. Needed a couple of reboots and installs. But it all seems to work rather well now. My crontab did not make it. Strange, but not the end of the world. The WWAN icon dissapeared from the menu bar. It turns out that you can add things to the menu bar by running them. They are located in:


/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu\ Extras/WWAN.menu


Other than that it has been pretty flawless. 10.5.2 seems to use less memory than than 10.4.11

The memory leak in ATSServer server seems to be gone as well. Yeah!

Overall it seems to be a very nice iteration. Somebody should put OS X 10.0,1,2,3,4 and now 5 side by side. That would be a very interesting example of design evolution. Apple did well in their upgrade concept in between major and minor releases.

My pet theory about Apple is this: Nothing major gets decided without “Steve”. Most of the mid size decissions are made based on “what would Steve say to this”.
Things that his Steve-ness is likely to use are finetuned and well honed. He probably have never a folder in the dock for instance. That “Fan mode” is simply ridicolous. Good thing it can be replaced with the “List” option now in 10.5.2. So on the good side we find: OS X, iPhone, probably Keynote (I would not know),
Safari, Finder (scrolls like butter) (<= Finder is good and bad. What S. uses works, but it’s still broken elsewhere)

Then there is the sad side of Apple: Unix in general (there are no tape devices. Yes, there are none. Go Figure!), OS X Server (joke, really, it is one) Pro Apps: Some are really nice,
but overall there has been very little innovation. Quicktime is bubbling features on the surface, Final Cut is not bad, Motion was neat, yet pointless, Color was thrown in for free, and Final Cut Server has not been released yet.

Apple should release the Pro Apps division out of their ridicolous communication strangulation and let it go on it’s own rules. People need Beta versions. They want to shape the product. Millions of dollars of peoples testing and feedback get wasted right now because Apple is unable to apply different commuincation rules for consumer products like iPhones versus applications like Shake. Idiotic. Not like Apple? Well, much like Apple. There is the dark side of the Apple. That’s the one that Steve’s light does not shine on. He should realize that, and give those divisions the room they need to grow. Sure Apple, Inc can afford not to do that. Apple, Inc can afford many things. Some of them might be pretty stupid. Like the way the ProApps division is been treated.

So I thought I’d give OS X Server another try. With 10.2 it was dismals. But things might have changed. Years have gone by. Turns out some of the horror is gone. But overall it is still a waste of time. Total waste. Serving AFP volumes. Fair enough, that works. I got a used G5 and over gigE the performance is decent.

For everthing else: Just don’t touch it. Apple has made a nice and impressive bullet list of features. And every single one I have tried to use stinks. It is as bad as Microsoft software 5 years ago. Just get any linux server do these things. Trying to configure / tweak / guess the Apple server interface is (still) an utter waste of time. It might demo ok, but anything that you like to do in real life (anymous ftp with write permissions, having a second wiki that does NOT 404, etc etc) is simply impossible. Allot of clicking to just find the feature to be broken in the end. A waste of 500 Dollars. That’s what OS X server 10.5 still is. Stay away from it. You will be much happier.

when compiling gives this error:

/usr/bin/ld: Undefined symbols:
std::__default_alloc_template
::deallocate(void*, unsigned long)
std::__default_alloc_template ::allocate(unsigned long)


then use

gcc_select 3.3


to use the proper compiler.

(this is a blog entry that I will hopefully find when I google for this problem again in six months or so)

After I rebooted my computer the Keychain prompted me for a password. I had seen this on other people machines before. The peskiness of this issue is rather windowesk. I am so glad that I could fix it! I got out the backup of my machine and copied the contents of ~/Library/Keychains from there. Reboot. Done, works again. Needless to say that I made a quick copy of this Keychains directory.

The problem was that none of my passwords really work. Apple recommends in those cases to delete the keychain and create a new one. Which is rather ridicolous. I have 140 items in my keychain. Of which I propably use 80, of those I maybe remember 50 the password for. It’s not a nice outlook having to enter / guess passwords 80 times in the next months. Probably exactly when I need to get something done quickly. Not getting distracted by the machine when something needs to get done is important. It’s why I choose to run a Mac.

How nice to have a backup.

In the Apple store I had a quick look and hands on with the MacBook Air. And I am quiet underwhelmed. Yes, it is light. Yes it has thin edges. Thin edges are probably a great thing when you would like to put your computer into an inter office envelope. Funny thing is, I never had reason to do that. Since six years I have been pretty on various laptop models for the greater part of my waking hours. I have use the thing in various places in in rather unorthodox ways I think. But, never ever did I say to myself: “Darn, the laptop does not fit into this interoffice envelope!”. If the 15″ was to big then I took the iBook aka Macbook. Works for me. If the 15″ is to small then I hook up another screen or get on a real computer. Yesterday I used the big iMac for instance and it just worked great.

I really don’t see the point to spend allot of money for a machine that has allot of drawbacks, and whos only upside seems to be that it does fit into an envelope.

Too bad, would love to justify a new computer.

BluRay would have been a better thing than this Air hocus-pocus.

For me this blog entry is very interesting in a couple of ways. Yes, it does expose that Apple has created a two class world. Other developers are welcome, as long as they add applications and functionalities. But whenever Apple feels like it, they will keep parts of the system they develop for themselves. This is extremely stupid and short sighted. It certainly got Microsoft not anywhere.

At


/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport


There is a very neat airport command line program. Starting it with –help will show you the possible options.
I like specially the -I option to show me the actual strenght of the signal etc in numbers. Not some bars. It also
seems to accurate more precisly what is going on. I wrote a quick perl wrapper to give me the outputs I care about
as a one line:


#!/usr/bin/perl

my %trans = (
"commQuality" , "cQ",
"rawQuality" , "rQ",
"avgSignalLevel" , "sL" ,
"avgNoiseLevel" , "nL" ,
"lastTxRate" , "lR" ,
"maxRate" , "mR" ,
"Security" , "sec:"
);
while (1){
#print "x\n";
foreach my $o (`airport -I`){
#print "y $o\n";
$o =~ /\s*([^\:]+): (.*)/;
my $k = $1;
my $v = $2;
if ($trans{$k}){
print "$trans{$k} $v ";
}
#print "$k -> $v\n";
}
print "\n";
sleep ($sleep);
}


The other helpful option is the -s one: It scans all base stations it can find and displays them. Much better than the gui menu.

Moving this program in the bin folder would be a nice move by apple. Giving it a man page would even be better. But the way it is is certainly much better than nothing.

With OS 10.4.11, but also before I have sometimes the funky behaviour that google appears to down: Both in Safari and fireofx the whole internet works normal, but when I do a google search both browsers show me google being down. Which is a blatant lie. In the terminal doing a


sudo killall lookupd


fixes the issues. It seems to happen when google can not be reached for reasons like an intermittend connection and and lookupd seems to give up on that name.