Author: 1

macbook air – and I don’t care

Apple marketing technology

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.

“Still haven’t seen my bill, I’m actually eager to pay it.”

confessions of a pixel pusher economy interdubs marketing

That’s an actual quote of a client in an email received a couple of minutes ago. It is his first month with Interdubs, and he is not used to the fact that the bill will only arrive once the month is over. And then he can pay it. Or not. If he should feel like that. Which sounds ‘good hearted’ or ‘weak’. But it makes actually allot of (business) sense: Most of my clients have made more money with the site in their first week of using it, then it will cost them for whole month. A not so significant part of them actually takes just a few hours to make the 285 that the services costs them. Either by direct billing or by improved client relationships. I was aware of this when I designed the system and set the price. The price is solely based on the system working as well as it seems to be. It is arranged around my costs and the future potential of more clients. And maybe on the fact that I like to code fast.

I really hate the business model that tries to leach on to the success of its clients. Network Neutrality is one of those. Phone companies would sure love to charge more for important business conversations than for idle chit chat.

But back to Interdubs: having a super reasonable price that are people actually eager to pay makes everything much easier on everybody. So far people paid their bills. The majority of companies in record time. Thanks again and also from here. If I would try to squeeze more money out of the service, then I might need an accounting department that starts bugging people. I’d rather not.

On the other side with the latest feature additions the price / performance ratio is in danger to tip from “great” to “ridicolously great”. I have feedback from many of my clients saying that the service is too cheap. And I suspect that I could actually sign up more people if the price were higher. Most people think just because the competition is ten times more expensive it also would be better.

OS X API Apple secretism bullshit

Apple OSX technology

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.

one fucking fifty?

politics

you need 1.51 dollars today to buy one Euro.

I know, since I bought lots of Euros today.

I needed 89 cents to buy a Euro before the moron became President.

box office as one long graph

media

Interesting and nice use of Flash

airport command line utility

Apple OSX

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

#airport usually is in /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources
use strict;
my $sleep = $ARGV[0] || 3;

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.

can not send mail on SBC network: change the port from 25 to 587

technology

Friend of mine started to work out of a place that has a SBC DSL connection. He could not send mail with Mail.app and his .mac mail account any longer. Chaning the mail port from 25 to 587 did change that. Things worked fine after that.

google down? Probably not

Apple OSX

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.

Nader – again

politics

Since it worked so great for Bush in 2000 Nader is trying the same for McCain in 08.

MacLarren mashup

media