Andreas Wacker

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.

Since a while I have a very early MacBook Pro. Overall I got used to it, love it as much as I did the PowerBook. Funny how you get used to everything. I am sure it still gets how etc etc. Back then I got it with the biggest drive that was possible: 120GB. Of course that one has been above 95% full for the last year or so. Finally I got around to put a 250GB drive in the machine and, surprisingly, it even worked. I did probably not to these things in the smartest way, but in the end it worked:

I got a 250 GB drive from Amazon that let’s you end up with 232 GB formatted capacity in real bytes. The Western Digital WD2500BEVS Scorpio 250 GB 2.5-inch SATA Hard Drive is 129$ right now.
I got a Macally B-S250U USB 2.0 2.5-Inch SATA Hard Drive Enclosure for 25$. Putting the drive into the enclosure was easier than I thought. Funny enough the enclosure needs a 2 USB connections to work. One for data the other one for power. Even more strange is that with just one cable the LED will light up and the drive will click repeatedly. I was convinced that the drive was DOA at that point.

So then I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the contents of my internal drive to the newer bigger one. It took more than a minute to copy all the Adobe Acrobat crap. I really need to delete that. Adobe Acrobat is ‘near-malware’. Anyway. I let the copy finish over night.

There are lots of screws to get into the MacBook Pro. The internet seems to agree ont he fact that the MacBook Pro is much easier to get into than the PowerBook. I found the instructions at iFixit to be very helpful. The Torx T6 screw driver you need for 2 screws in the case and 4 on the drive I found at Sears. 2.49. They sell a set of 3 little screwdrivers for 10 dollars. Or you pay 7 buying them individually.

Gettting the upper part keyboard part off was a bit tricky. A little bit of careful jiggling around did the trick.

I also went ahead and disconnected the power light. It sit’s on top of the harddrive. I don’t need to see a room illuminated by my sleeping laptop while I am trying to sleep as well.

Still amazed that it did work.

Roughly drafted writes about Apple and it’s ProApps. And the future of them. It feels that the author uses just a few to many arguments. I think that not all is well in the Pro Apps world of Apple. Nobody knows. Neither do I. That’s the Apple way, and that is part of the problem: You can not manage the communication around Pro Apps like you do for the next iPod.

Apple announced Aperture 2. I neither used Aperture-1 nor Lighroom. But I talked to people who did. Aperture was (an / another) example for Apples inability to come up with Pro Applications on it’s own. You just can’t in that vacuum that the super tight Apple communication rules dictate. Apple has money and brilliant engineers and the best intentions. But that’s not enough. You have to have an open dialog with your Pro clients. Pushing updates that claim “enhancements and bug fixes” and do not give any more detail is simply unacceptible for Pro Applications.

Looks like I better now quiet my day job. Wait, my day job is about the future! Sigh.

Let’s see how I did:

New Laptops: Third Generation for what is called the “ProLine” now. First was Titanium, second Aluminum (that stuff that bends when you look at it, keeps AppleCare so profitable). Now there will be a third one. It’s about time. The 12″ not making into into the brave new Intel feature left a gap in the revenue potential field for a suspicously long time. Not sure if the 17″ has such a bright future. Depends what how easy it is to squeeze out a new flavor of laptop.

It’s small, but it’s not part of the pro line. It’s a new line. I give myself 30% on that one.

There will be Blu-Ray. One could speculate that the MacPro bumps last week were announced after Warners killed HD-DVD. In other words: takes Blu-Ray now more Steve time, and the Pro upgrades fell of the key-note schedule because of that?

Not. 0%. Stupid me.

Those new laptops might have built in high speed internet connection. I would appreciate EVDO. It’s nice. And the Amazon showed that you can built it in, and that Sprint is willing to make deals. Imagine you buy a new laptop and get free non bullshit (t-online / starbucks I am looking at you) internet whereever you are. I use EVDO since roughly a year and it’s just great. Nothing short of that. Technically you get GPS with EVDO for free, I wish that Apples puts GPS where it should be: in every freaking machine. Yes, I like to Google for something and get results that are optimised for my current whereabouts. But GPS would put the iPhone on the spot for not having it. Something to spin. (Apple likes has a pathological history of lying around battery life).

0%, again. I sense a pattern.

One could dream that Apple becomes an ISP. The iPhone worked great for them. But AT&T? They get their money, but nobody started to like AT&T. They are still considered the necessary evil. Who loves his ISP? Which ISP is known for being awesome? Nobody. Interesting. There is a market. People are not paying their landline or even cable bills anymore, but they keep their cellphones going, and probably also their Internet connections. That’s money that still is out there. And Apple is known to show a strong desire for that kind of thing. Sucessfully.

Zilch. Still would have been nice.

Speaking of Money, AAPL trades at 176. I think it will touch 190 after the keynote.

It’s at 169 right now. That makes -100%.

One of the reasons will be that there will be something that let’s people imagine that profits that used be over at Blockbuster Netflix will now also flow to Cupertino. iTunes is a money making machine.

In german you say “Auch ein blindes Huhn findet mal ein Korn”, probably would translate into the direction of “Eventually even the blind chicken finds some grain”. 100%

The Laptop prices will look like the current ones. But by the time you have added the things you would like to have those new machines will be pretty expensive. I think a company that managed to get 1,000 US$ for each phone (!) they sell, is looking at money differently after that.

Yeah, greed, so easy to predict! The new 13inch laptop goes for 3,000 US$ when you put in the nice 64GB drive without any moving parts. And boy will they sell that machine to people! 100%.

Finally there will be some iPhone news that will keep the sales going. Probably some (3rd party) Application(s) that can be downloaded. I doubt a hardware version 2 of the device. If so, then it would need to be in stores in a very few weeks, so that there would be no gap in the sales.

Hm, 30% again. 1.1.3 works nicely. Has location built in (does not work in Europe where I am right now).

Looks like my hit rate (if you can call it that at that rate) is one out of five. Still trying to find an excuse to get the 3K air. I am sure it is awesome.
And then my EVDO modem would hang out of it to the side. What a sight!

The part of the world that cares about Apple computers is holding it’s breath. Real Christmas will come around in a couple of hours. It is a big deal. I would carefully estimate that a hundred thousand people are pretty interesting in what will be revealed in the next hours.

It also is in Apples interest to provide people with the information directly the way they intended it. Having people transcribe it is what happens. But not necessarily what Apple would want.

Let’s make no mistake: the Keynote is as brilliant of a piece of Propaganda as it is possible for the audience of 2008. It is surprising that Apple does not broadcast it over the radio. I am serious. It can not cost that much to get this going. No need for quality. The geeks that care for this would run out and even buy a short wave resceiver just to listen to Steves voice live. All internet attempts to do live audio streaming seem not to work. They didn’t in the last years, since those 100,000 people would have to high bandwidth demands. Apple used to stream it, but stopped.

Kinda lame.

Last pre macworld ‘08 apple related post. I hope. Thinking about what the future might bring I thought about the past. And, actually, in all that stellar success that Apple has amassed there are a couple of products that were actually not doing so well.

Apple TV. Who has one? And, more importantly who would need one? It took a genius like Scoble a mere couple of years to realize that a MacMini could things better.

Apple “Hifi”. Yes, they made a stereo once. I bought one. And then there were 5 other people.

Lamp iMac (gen2). Not really Apples fault. Good design, just to different for people to pick and drag home.

Starbucks: I have not seen any numbers, but i am pretty sure that sales are horrible for those ‘oh I like what I am hearing and like to buy it right now’ impulse idiocracy Pawlows impuls buys.

Aperture. But I rather not talk about Pro products. That’s a whole nother story.

pre Iphone “video” iPods. What was that resolution again? Those were proof that people really will buy anything. OK, they elected Bush the younger 1.5 times as their president, so nothing should surprise.

Hard not to predict anything right now. Here what I think that will happen tomorrow. Is it actually tomorrow that Uncle Jobs comes down from the Mountain? Anyhow.

New Laptops: Third Generation for what is called the “ProLine” now. First was Titanium, second Aluminum (that stuff that bends when you look at it, keeps AppleCare so profitable). Now there will be a third one. It’s about time. The 12″ not making into into the brave new Intel feature left a gap in the revenue potential field for a suspicously long time. Not sure if the 17″ has such a bright future. Depends what how easy it is to squeeze out a new flavor of laptop.

There will be Blu-Ray. One could speculate that the MacPro bumps last week were announced after Warners killed HD-DVD. In other words: takes Blu-Ray now more Steve time, and the Pro upgrades fell of the key-note schedule because of that?

Those new laptops might have built in high speed internet connection. I would appreciate EVDO. It’s nice. And the Amazon showed that you can built it in, and that Sprint is willing to make deals. Imagine you buy a new laptop and get free non bullshit (t-online / starbucks I am looking at you) internet whereever you are. I use EVDO since roughly a year and it’s just great. Nothing short of that. Technically you get GPS with EVDO for free, I wish that Apples puts GPS where it should be: in every freaking machine. Yes, I like to Google for something and get results that are optimised for my current whereabouts. But GPS would
put the iPhone on the spot for not having it. Something to spin. (Apple likes has a pathological history of lying around battery life).

One could dream that Apple becomes an ISP. The iPhone worked great for them. But AT&T? They get their money, but nobody started to like AT&T. They are still considered the necessary evil. Who loves his ISP? Which ISP is known for being awesome? Nobody. Interesting. There is a market. People are not paying their landline or even cable bills anymore, but they keep their cellphones going, and probably also their Internet connections. That’s money that still is out there. And Apple is known to show a strong desire for that kind of thing. Sucessfully.

Speaking of Money, AAPL trades at 176. I think it will touch 190 after the keynote.

One of the reasons will be that there will be something that let’s people imagine that profits that used be over at Blockbuster Netflix will now also flow to Cupertino. iTunes is a money making machine.

The Laptop prices will look like the current ones. But by the time you have added the things you would like to have those new machines will be pretty expensive. I think a company that managed to get 1,000 US$ for each phone (!) they sell, is looking at money differently after that.

Finally there will be some iPhone news that will keep the sales going. Probably some (3rd party) Application(s) that can be downloaded. I doubt a hardware version 2 of the device. If so, then it would need to be in stores in a very few weeks, so that there would be no gap in the sales.

While the rest of the country sobbers up from the stupid real estate bubble fueled growth delusions, Apple will go on very strongly. So will Google btw. And not many more.

Richard Kerris leaves Apple to become CTO at Lucas Film

In order to get Apache running with suexec under OS X 10.4.11 and also have php you will need to do the following:

1) get the apache sources. (1.3.39)

Since years I work on a couple of computers via command line. Since they are real unix computers it all works remarkably well. For a specific solution I need to run osacompile. AppleScript needs to get compiled. I did not find a way to distribute it as text. So finally I got a hold of an OS X machine in the internet. More on that part later. osacompile really wants to run the application that it will talk to later. Also rather odd. But, hey, we talk Apple here. A sect in disguise of a technology company. So everything is possible. Or rather impossible. Like adding a development environment. The Box happened to have no Dev Tools installed. Usually that’s maybe a bit timely but overall straight forward. Installing development tools on a unix computer.
With Apple OS X 10.4.11 it turns out that doing so via ssh is not as trivial. You can download the source code. But first you need to create a developer account with ADC. It’s free. It’s annoying. They keep forgetting my password. Once you logged in,
you could download the dmg file to your local machine. I could have done that and waited only a couple of weeks for my DSL to upload the 900+ MB file to the final server I need it on. Downloading the dmg directly did not work. I had to fake a login. Which is easier as it seems. In the browser that is logged in (firefox I assume) you look for a cookie called ADCDownloadAuth. This you copy paste into the following command line:

curl -b "ADCDownloadAuth=SomeVeryLongCookieString" -O \
http://adcdownload.apple.com/Developer_Tools/xcode_2.5_developer_tools/xcode25_8m2558_developerdvd.dmg

At least that’s the valid file of today.
Once you have the file you attach (aka mount) it via:

hdiutil attach xcode25_8m2558_developerdvd.dmg

and navigate into

/Volumes/Xcode Tools/Packages

to then run:

sudo installer -verbose -pkg XcodeTools.mpkg -target /


Don’t run this against XcodeTools.mpkg in /Volumes/Xcode Tools directly. This results in the error message:

2008-01-09 03:47:43.889 installer[2843] IFPkg::_parseOldStyleForLanguage - can't find .info file (XcodeTools)


which does not google very sucessful.

The install seems to work, from what I can tell so far. I have gcc and make. And that’s all I cared for.

We have this Laptop that has a glitch. The backlight goes out if you hold it wrong. It’s an older maching (iBook 600Mhz) and it got replaced. But today I wanted to get it going as a server again. It’s a unix computer. And 600Mhz is plenty to serve a couple of web pages. It runs OS X 10.3.9, that’s as long it has not been updated. Now I try to get it on the Apple Airport. And, that is the problem: It does not. Beachball for a while, and then the error message:

There was an error joining the AirPort network "yournamehere"
Tray again // OK


What the fuck!
Frst: that “Try again” is bullshit. It has never worked. Never ever.

Secondly: What exactly was the error? I am sure the computer knows a little bit more than ‘error’.
The Airport works just fine, so it can talk to two computers right now. So why writes Apple code that is retarded in that it does not give you the slightest hint what the problem might be. I don’t expect a hex dump to be slapped into each users face. But somewhere, maybe in a log file (!) the machine could give me a hint what it would be upset about. It’s one thing that Apple stuff does not work with Apple stuff. But to be quiet about any causes or reasons is just plain stupid and ignorant. Fucking Apple Computers. There are other companies being equally crap. Just that Apple runs around with this attitude of being better and user friendly. Actually they are not. They are just better liars:

Ten years ago Apple introduced the iMac. Which is a great machine. And a great concept. Watch in the end of this 7 minute clip how that man calls a circular (!!) piece of plastic “the most wonderful mouse you have ever used”. It’s exactly this arrogant attitude that makes Apple so annoying.

These lines will run /path/command with a first parameter of the file name that got
dropped on the Apple Script app:


on open (ItemList)
repeat with thisItem in ItemList
do shell script "/path/command " & POSIX path of thisItem
end repeat
end open


Simple. And unintuitive. AppleScript would rule the world if it would have JavaScript syntax for instance. Instead apple idiots made “Automator”. What a silly piece of shit. Only fanboys spend time to learn a buggy and totally non portable interface like AppleScript or Automator. I could have bothered with Windows if I would want that. Oh, the script above fails to work when there are spaces in the name. Thanks AppleScript.

Steve Jobs certainly takes no pictures. At home, the task for the day: to get the pictures off the Samsung snapshot camera onto the iPook. So that my wife can take new ones. Not thinking much (always a bad start) I directed her to iPhoto to manage the digicam images. What a piece of junk. iPhoto.

If iPhoto would be an application that people were supposed to be money for, then it’s prices should be minus a couple of hundred dollars. Seriously. Nothing works as expected. It seems to have it’s own little logic. I seriously think it as big of a piece of junk as iBackup. Or whatever that pre Timemachine pretend-ware was called. The one with the red umbrella icon.

I heard (in horror) that iViewMedia got bought by Microsoft. If I have to deal with iPhoto for 2 more minutes then I am ready to buy my first Microsoft software.

In unix you tell the system via a file called /etc/fstab which drives should be mounted.
Simple. Works. Except for OS X. Some crazy new fancy database sheme was supposed to replace /etc/fstab. It was all so amazing. It is junk, that’s what it was. Didn’t stop Apple-Idiots to claim it would be amazing. And countless websites offered help. What was one line a file became pages and pages of instructions.

Finally with 10.5 /etc/fstab is also part of OS X. It took years. It’s good that it’s there. it’s not good that it did not become available in the updates to 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 and 10.4. Apple is idiotically stubborn sometimes.

Computerworld looks at internet market share data for different devices / operating systems. The headline reads ‘iPhones closing in on 0.1%’. That does sound like laughable little. The author paints a different picture, but I have no interest repainting that here.

I looked at the iPhone user share on Interdubs, and found the following numbers:

November 0.22
October 0.54
September 0.35
August 0.74
July 0.45

Not surprisingly they are by small magnitudes bigger than the general ones found by Net Applications. I had thought that they would be even higher. The iPhone has a nice display. It’s fully supported by Interdubs. Was it a mistake to invest into the iPhone mode? Absolutely not. It is very interesting to see those numbers. With already having iPhone support there is no second guessing ‘what if there were a special iPhone browsing mode’. There is, and that’s what the numbers look like. Right now.

Matt Cutts , the google quality czsar, explains why they reduced the importance of weblogs participating in pay per post programs. I feel the same way and block them since May in BlogsNow.

Interestingly, and extremely simplified, I admit, it seems to be the business model of Google to sell the truth. Which makes it valuable. They steer most of the internet traffic. But if they would fail, people would notice. As long as Yahoo and MSN still exist and could in theory kinda half ass a hypothetical un-ethical google if it came to it, it’s good busyness for for Google to stick to the truth.

Which is not what usually is going on:

A question asked, and no answer:

Same pattern here:

So, my simple reaction is, if people like politicians and Apple-PR are not answering questions, then I will not listen to what they are trying to say. Why should I?

Once in while my OS 10.4.11 machine goes stupid, and has trouble resolving specific host names.

Opening a terminal window and entering:


sudo killall -HUP lookupd


fixes this. Lookupd is one of these more stupid Apple ideas. But since Cupertino has inherited the infallible attribute from the Roman Catholic Church it is pointless to tell them about it. Apple is so shiny and perfect to the outside. Inside it just looks like the Roman Catholic Church on the peak of it’s power.