November 2011
1 post
Decision Maker Having Decision Making Trouble →
“It’s really important to me to make the right decision, not the fast decision,” [Whitman] told those gathered with her on the HP campus, adding that a decision would come in the next three to four weeks.
Sounds like HP/Whitman are waiting on the outcome of some pending hardware or software vendor deals before determining WebOS’s fate. If HP decides to proceed with...
October 2011
2 posts
2 tags
All Contact with Customers is Customer Service
A simple question leads to two different experiences. One confusing and frustrating, the other clear and helpful. Guess which one came from Apple and which came from AT&T…
My question:
I’d like to get an iPhone 4S, but I bought an iPhone 4 a year ago. Do I need to pay full price for the 4S or can I get a discount?
Let’s ask AT&T
Login. *tap* *tap* *tap* iPhone...
1 tag
My Favorite Steve Moment
RIP Steve Jobs, 1955 - 2011
Just a quick memory to help me feel better, despite Steve’s death today:
I’ve enjoyed watching Steve perform at various Apple events over the last few years, but my absolute favorite moment was when, on January 27th 2010,
Steve showed us the iPad for the first time.
Watch carefully and you can see Jobs — usually intense, focused, and well-paced in...
August 2011
1 post
1 tag
Review: Leviathan Wakes (book)
Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I was supposed to savor this book, really, but this excellent space opera practically forced me to finish it in two days.
If you’ve played or are familiar with the Dead Space video game franchise, the plot of Leviathan Wakes will be familiar. Humans plunging headfirst into the depths of space, corporate greed, military...
March 2011
1 post
1 tag
February 2011
2 posts
Marco.org: Subscriptions and the new In-App... →
marco:
What if major publishers, such as the New York Times or The Wall Street Journal (whose current app violates this new policy, along with Hulu, Netflix, Kindle, The Economist, and countless others), decide that they don’t want to offer their services through IAP (at 30% less revenue per customer) and just cancel their current or future iOS apps?
Don’t we all lose?
The discussion...
January 2011
4 posts
1 tag
wild chocolate: 13 Reasons Why Software Is Not... →
wildchocolate:
Lately it seems more and more evident that the general population expects software to be free or at the very least cheap. This is reinforced when companies like Apple, who make a tremendous income off of their hardware, the iTunes store, and many other revenue streams, heavily discount their software.
The expectation of “software should be free” is perfectly...
3 tags
Verizon iPhone Answers
As a follow-up to my last post, here’s a quick summary of the questions and available answers regarding the Verizon iPhone:
Any word about a Verizon 3G iPad?
Not from the official announcement event, but an interview with Verizon’s CFO confirmed the rumor that a CDMA iPad will be available to Verizon customers later this year. No official word on data plan pricing, though.
Will the...
4 tags
More Verizon iPhone Questions
With this week’s confirmed launch of the highly anticipated “Verizon iPhone,” the big question (will it actually arrive?) has already been answered. Engadget has a thorough rundown on the history of this question and the inevitable conclusion, including yet more speculation about the road ahead with AT&T’s iPhone exclusivity coming to an end. I’ve got a few more...
November 2010
3 posts
1 tag
Sit Back, Relax, and Enjoy the Ride
Apple’s level of success and customer adoration has created a fair amount of discomfort. As a technology steamliner, Apple is setting a record pace on the journey from one island of technologies (fixed, wired, physical media, isolated, expandable, hackable, moving parts, keyboard & mouse, open market) to another (mobile, wireless, media-less, connected, sealed appliance, “just...
2 tags
WP7 Strategy Confusion
I’m struggling to understand Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 strategy.
The WP7 ads make it clear that the current batch of smartphones are either ridiculously inefficient or annoyingly narcissistic and addictive. So, these new WP7 phones are for people who don’t want to spend much time on their phones.
But why would a potential customer pay for a two hundred dollar phone — plus...
2 tags
MobileMe Calendar Upgrade
I didn’t realize that you actually have to log in to me.com to upgrade the MobileMe calendar, so I’ve been loping along with the old calendar for too long. The upgrade process had a few hair-raising moments, like the “add these 782 calendar items?” sync alert and the “you’ve got a lot of calendar events, so you’ll get the old ones back when we’ve...
September 2010
1 post
1 tag
Wither Apple's Family Room Computer?
Steve Jobs stated in yesterday’s keynote address that people “don’t want a computer on their TV.” Pairing this statement with the Apple TV’s admittedly disappointing sales could lead one to believe that the iTV concept is behind Apple at this point. Or, it could be another of Steve’s famous product misdirections, fed directly to the press.
Given...
August 2010
2 posts
3 tags
Sparser Documents in CouchDB with Ruby and...
I’ve become a huge fan of CouchDB and as a Rails developer that means turning to an ORM like CouchRest to make the database access more convenient. CouchRest has a ton of helpful features and really makes it easy to slide into developing for CouchDB.
Enough with that, though. CouchRest has a particular data serialization behavior that, for me, isn’t quite Couchy enough. Empty...
2 tags
Wave Couldn't Compete with Email and Should Never...
After reading other post-mortem analyses of Google Wave’s demise, I think Google’s biggest failure still isn’t being addressed: Wave was competing with email, head on, and had no chance of winning.
Wave competed with email?
Sure it did. Wave was supposed to be the future of Internet communication and collaboration. We use all sorts of tools to accomplish this sort of stuff...
July 2010
1 post
1 tag
Git support in Xcode 4
The Version editor can also show you a detailed log of past events, and track blame for past check-ins. Complex SCM commands are managed for you behind the scenes. It is even possible to manage multiple projects within a single Xcode 4 workspace, one project managed in Subversion, the other in Git, all updated automatically.
— via Apple
June 2010
8 posts
iPhone 3GS Owners Now Qualify for an Early Upgrade
Update: Neither system glitch nor random promotion, my iPhone 4 arrived without issue. I’m still eagerly awaiting the announcement of the end of AT&T’s iPhone exclusivity, though, despite my “month or so” prediction.
AT&T was very generous to offer iPhone 3G owners the iPhone 4 up to six months early. So why would they now offer iPhone 3GS owners, such as...
Why I am dropping (for wrong or fake reasons)... →
nosql:
Reasons presented in the post:
Lack of transactions
Missing records
No means to do any joins
Schema-less
Unstable replication
Not stable
Real question is: if these were needed then why MongoDB in the first place?
It’s amazing how quickly points #1 and #2 become crucial after the honeymoon period is over and the database needs to be dependable. “Nah, I’m not...
3 tags
Fixing MySQL Encoding Issues with Ruby1.8
Having a recent and urgent need to convert a large (9 GB) MySQL database from latin1 to utf8, I went looking for a straight-forward solution. With over a half-million Google results for MySQL UTF-8 conversion, I was left with more questions than answers. In-place conversion? Dump, convert, and reload? Convert, then fix encoding errors? Fix encoding errors, then convert? Do both at the...
iOS 4: Being able to put folders on the dock makes up for the loss of being able to launch the camera app by double clicking the Home button.
2 tags
iPad 3G Email Addresses Exposed via AT&T →
So, iPad 3G owners, you may be getting an official email about this. Or phishing attempts. Or both.
So, let me get this straight… this new iPhone fits in your hand, vibrates, has a multi-touch hi-res display, 6-axis acceleration sensors, BlueTooth, and hours of battery life. And there will be millions of them by next year and thousands of dedicated app developers?
Nintendo, pray that Apple doesn’t decide to make a game/entertainment console. (or figure out how to transform the...
3 tags
The infestation of the abstract business model.
Layton Duncan on the “abstract business model”:
The post bubble years have seen an infestation among online startups. An infestation of what I call the abstract business model.
Put simply, business model abstraction is where someone other than the user bears the financial cost of a product or service: ie the product revenue is abstracted from the users of the product. Facebook is...
1 tag
Why, PHP, Why?
In this particular PHP site I’m working on, some past developer really liked to use bare strings for array indices. Here’s what I used to fix (most of) the unquoted strings:
sed -i -e "s/\$\(\w\+\)\[\([a-z]\w\+\)\]/$\1['\2']/gi" *.php
One downside of this one-liner is that real PHP constants are incorrectly quoted when used as array indices. Another is that multi-dimensional array...
May 2010
4 posts
1 tag
iPad eBook Experience
My experience, so far, with iBooks and the iPad:
I should really use iBooks, since I don’t have anything in there except the Prag Prog magazines. Oh, and “Winnie the Pooh”.
opens iBooks and searches for a novel by David J. Williams
Nope, not there. How about a business book.
searches for a book by Jim Collins
Nope, not there either. I don’t expect iBooks to...
1 tag
Lucid Lynx Font "Fuzziness"
Something’s up with the font rendering in Lucid Lynx. Judging from some of the official and unofficial screenshots, I’d say I’m not the only one experiencing what I’d like to call “fuzziness” with the default on-screen font rendering. Fortunately, there’s a quick way to revert back to the old font rendering behavior, if that’s more to your...
2 tags
Integrating Ruby 1.8 and 1.9 with Lucid Lynx
Conveniently, Ruby versions 1.8, 1.9, and 1.9.1 are all available in the Lucid (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS) repositories. Inconveniently, only the rubygems packages have configurations assigned for Debian’s “alternatives” system. Here’s a quick fix!
The Issue
Lucid’s ruby1.8 and rubygems1.8 packages install the ruby1.8 command for the interpreter and the gem and gem1.8 commands for RubyGems...
