We bought some very nice pictures for our living room:
I really like the work of Siebe Warmoeskerken. It is nice these days that one can buy things directly from the artist. No need for a Gallery getting in the way.
Bill Joy wrote allot of software. Allot of what he wrote in the 70s is still in use. Of course not bit by bit. Not even much of his original source code might be left. But -whether you know it or not- BSD Unix, nfs and vi make your life better. Every day. Before his generation computer code was entered via punch cards. Access was very limited. Even on the terminals that Bill used people had to account for the time they used. But:
So the computers of the time at Michigan, you were charged like $3 an hour. It was
interactive, which was cool. It wasn’t just punch cards, but you were charged like $3 an
hour to be on, and you were charged for CPU time, disk IO’s. Every little thing the
computer did, it would keep counts and charge you. So the Anthropology Department
had an account with several thousand dollars so we could get some reasonable computer
time. And we figured out how to get free time very quickly. There was a bug in the
system where you could tell it when you logged in, you’d say you wanted time, and time
equals seven seconds, or time equals five minutes, some limit. You’d sign up for a block
of time. You’d say T equals K, which was not a number, but that would give you free
time, and then we had as much time as we wanted until they plugged that loophole, which
took several years.
from Andreas Bechtolsheim & William Joy, 1999
I am sure that they would have found a different way to get the time they needed. Sometimes
gaming the system is a good thing. But certainly not as often as people think. The spirit of Enron is still out there.
Stephen Pigeon posted an interesting blog entry about the history of knowledge in math. The Internet CAN be a nice and inspiring place.
In order to operate the ZTE K3565-Z under OS X 10.5 or 10.6 you need to set the
network preference settings yourself. The Software defaults are wrong and will not work.
Vodafone phone support refers to debitel for this product. Debitel charges $1.55 a minute for support.
The bigger problem is that they don’t support OS X. They just say that they don’t know anything about it.
In the end things got working with these settings collected from the Internet and applied with a bit of luck:
When you insert the USB stick you get a volume with
Vodafone MC Installer
I ran this. I think it is needed. Also since its distinct crappyness will give you a taste of things to come. After you installed this the volume will no longer be mounted when the stick is being inserted.
Under 10.6 I got lots of messages about extensions not being working / being compatible. Both after the install and after the reboot this POS installer felt it needed.
Vodafone Mobile Connect.
should launch after the install. It fails the first time under OS X 10.6, complaining that it can not find a the stick. Just start it again.
The Vodafone Mobile Connect junk-app is good for one thing only: it lets you enter the PIN of the stick. The “Activate” / “Aktivieren” button is actually plain evil:
it will overwrite the network preference settings for the K3565-Z with non working defaults. Don’t click it.
Since we are talking crapware here the Network control panels gets populated with three devices for the ZTE stick. You can ignore / remove the ones ending in ATPort and DiagPort.
One should read “Vodafo…565-Z”. The number is *99***1#. That’s ok.
In order to make the ‘Connect’ / ‘Verbinden’ button sing for you have to change settings under ‘Advanced …’ / ‘Weitere Optionen …’.
In the Modem tab choose for the
‘vendor’ / ‘Hersteller’ the setting ‘Generic’ / ‘Allgemein’
then for the
model pick “GPRS (GSM/3) ”
for the
APN: event.vodafone.de
just like your Grandma always told you. Make sure to hit “Apply” / “Aendern” before you try to connect. If you “activate” the card with the mobile connect crapware then your settings will be overwritten.
While many in the US might think that getting a new car is mostly a matter of picking the right brand and dealership, in the end the darn things still have to be produced. Somewhere. And that part is actually quiet complex.
Nissan had to halt three of its plants since one chip was not available. Manufacturing in 2010 is a highly complex and interlocked environment.
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.â€
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.
I had no idea this exists: Google advanced search which I can see being very useful.
people don’t know how fast their Internet is
I hope that it takes a while before the couple of last mile vendors adopt their upgrade plans accordingly.
On a centos machine ldapsearch was not giving me much love when accessing a Microsoft Global directory server via ldaps and a given port. The error message I got was:
ldap_sasl_bind(SIMPLE): Can't contact LDAP server (-1)
When turning up debug level via -d 1 as in
ldapsearch -d 1 -v -H ldaps://servername:portnumber
I got the bit more revealing error message:
TLS certificate verification: Error, unable to get local issuer certificate
TLS trace: SSL3 alert write:fatal:unknown CA
TLS trace: SSL_connect:error in SSLv3 read server certificate B
TLS trace: SSL_connect:error in SSLv3 read server certificate B
TLS: can't connect: error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed (unable to get local issuer certificate).
It turns out that a simple line like
TLS_REQCERT never
in ldap.conf makes things better. In my particular install a simple ‘locate ldap.conf’ was a bit misleading. The true location of your config file can be revealed via:
strace ldapsearch -v -H ldaps://servername:portnumber 2>&1 | grep ldap.conf