Andreas Wacker

upgrade happy

Administrator — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 01:03:59 +0000

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 …

new media

Administrator — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 17:58:57 +0000

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.

kernel: 3w-9xxx: scsi0: WARNING: Character ioctl (0×108) timed out, resetting card.

Administrator — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 05:37:37 +0000

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.

culture: it’s amazing

Administrator — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 06:55:29 +0000

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.

worst online user management: APPLE

Administrator — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 08:05:20 +0000

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.

iPhone support

Administrator — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 13:49:48 +0000

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.

no bug left behind

Administrator — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 13:10:39 +0000

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.

adaptive beings

Administrator — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:54:16 +0000

Nicolas Carr asks Is Google Making Us Stupid.

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.

white is the new black

Administrator — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 19:08:16 +0000

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.

seing the wrong page? Again?

Administrator — Thu, 22 May 2008 08:30:28 +0000

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