The consensus seems to be that today’s announcements were a yawning success.
Some say there was no fire, the reality distortion field in Cupertino is out of alignment.
All Apple said was join us for some fun new products. They didn’t say they were going to show us anything BIG or DIFFERENT.
Hell, I forgot about the announcements until after dinner.
My favorite comment was, that to turn the new mini into a dedicated entertainment device would cost over $1000, and was not worth it that much.
Really? $1000?
A $599 Mini with 512 MB of RAM, 80GB of storage, a remote control and Front Row software, can’t adequately play movies, music and dvds on you television? Really!?
Jumping from $399 and $499, to $599 and $799 might be a bit steep. But Apple did up the ante on the components significantly.
Gigabit ethernet, 7200 RPM drives, 4 USB 2.0 + 1 Firewire port and up to 2GB of RAM, not to mention the faster CPU.
Let’s not forget Airport Extreme and Bluetooth 2.0 now comes STANDARD on EVERY mini. Not as expensive add-ons.
By the start of next school year, these will be selling for $499 and $599 is my bet.
Humpty Dumpty (aka my dead Xserve) is back in the rack.
The great guys over at Ten Plus Systems diagnosed and fixed the Xserve within 3 days.
Surprisingly, the culprit was a crappy G4 CPU. Never heard of that happening before, but Will at Ten Plus said it was common in 1st generation Xserves.
Given that this server has been replaced with others, my evil plan for world domination can now unfold! ;-)
In my river of feeds this evening, (err. morning?) I came a across this post from Russell.
His take on the differences between Web 2.0 and Mobile businesses, and it is an interesting one.
Basically, Mobiles charge for every thing that can be construed as having value. While Web 2.0 tends to have vague business models. Most still think traffic is king it seems.
This is the unlearned lesson from the first bubble in my opinion.
Sony’s PSP is a cool product. I owned one for a few months, loved some of the games, but eventually parted with it do to the poor placement of the analog control pad, poor text entry capabilities (given the applications which use it), but most importantly, the lack of video output and adequate storage.
If you could play UMD movies on an external device, as well as store 10-20 GB of data on the device it would be an excellent entertainment device for traveling.
As it stands, why buy a UMD movie if you can only view it on the PSP?
It makes no sense at all. I don’t want to own 2 copies of my movies.
Which is probably why Sony is scaling back production of UMD movies.
Hopefully, Sony will either address the output issue or scrap movie playback and focus on improving the gaming aspect of the device.
In Rails there are wonderful pre-built form components covering text fields, text areas, checkboxes and much more.
Also included are AJAX components like text_field_with_autocomplete, which is quite useful.
As I posted recently, the UI for selecting items typically relies on the SELECT tag. When the lists grow to an excessive length, it is an unfriendly user experience.
My first attempt involved the following UI.
The auto complete field allows the user to quickly search and set the selection of SELECT tag.
It would be great if Rails included a select_with_auto_complete.
I would love to see how others tackle the issue from a UI standpoint.
Last week I got the call all developers fear. Our excellent colocation provider, Hosted Solutions, called to say one of our servers was not responding.
After a few minutes of testing, I hopped in the car and headed down to see what was up.
One of our Xserves had fallen and couldn’t get up. After an hour of trying everything, the last rites were read, and I moved into recovery mode.
In our data center we have a number of Xserves and Mac Minis.
The Xserves do all the heavy lifting (database, mail servers and business applications, and minis handle trivial tasks, like serving static content and running low traffic applications (like this blog).
The hard choice was what to sacrifice in order to restore essential services.
The mail server with all the anti-spam, virus and archival functions would never run on a Mac Mini.
One of the Xserves was running a mix of legacy and recently released applications.
The new applications, having been built using Ruby on Rails not WebObjects, I knew could run anywhere. In a matter of minutes, with a a few swapped Xserve drives, the mail server was back in full swing.
The other Xserve drive was placed in a separate drive bay to allow access the application files just in case they were needed. It mounted perfectly and a few tests later I was satisfied stability had been achieved.
I headed home to strategize the restoration of the business applications.
Our old creaky WebObjects applications would not run on anything less than the Xserve running Mac OS X Server without some major web foo. So we decommissioned those for now.
That left four applications, two of which were critical, to get back online.
Within a couple hours all four applications were running on one of the minis under Lighttpd and FastCGI, with the databases still hosted on Xserves.
Surprisingly, the applications are performing better on the Mac Mini than on the Xserve.
We had been planning a major restructuring of our infrastructure. The Xserves are all the first models Apple released and are growing long in the tooth.
The dead Xserve is now being dissected to see if it can be resurrected. But it will have a whole new purpose if it makes back into the line up.
This is providing the opportunity to try out a day dream of mine.
I switched the site to accept only Pings and Trackbacks.
As Russell Beattie recently posted, they eat up time, and can spin off topic into personal attacks.
A mistake I made in the post, Worm Week, reminded me of the power of anonymous discourse, and led to a commenter questioning my ability at my chosen profession and the value of my views.
It is to be expected when you publish your commentary in any public forum, specially on the internet.
Trolling is the new rebellion. Outcasts, misfits and closed minded individuals partake in anonymous trolling to feel a sense of power.
With millions of discussion forum, mailing list and weblog posts every day, each one of us is more likely to strongly disagree with the majority of views published, than not.
I believe that the more I post, the more I learn about myself. If it offends, incites or bores people, I don’t care.
The courage to participate in life, regardless of consequence is the reward in everything I do.
That doesn’t mean I have to allow others to impose their limitations on me.
Of course, the longer one lives, the more likely you’ll make a hypocrite out of yourself.
Ambrosia Software and Intego identified Oompa-Loompa, consisting of a compressed malicious application, masquerading as a JPEG file.
For Oompa-Loompa to do damage a user must decompress the file, open the fake JPEG, and enter their administrator password.
F-Secure’s offering is a concept worm they created, called OSX/Inqtana.A and takes advantage of a security hole in 10.4.1 already patched by Apple.
The OSX/Inqtana.A requires the user to accept 3 separate Bluetooth file transfers.
In other words, much ado about nothing.
No system can be infected without multiple decisions on the part of the user.
Correction:
I am curious about one thing, F-Secure doesn’t offer a Mac product, so why are they writing and publishing demonstration worms?
My mistake, I misunderstood the article. F-Secure did NOT produce OSX/Inqtana.A as a proof of concept. They just seem to be the first to jump on the bandwagon this week.
Gmail for Domains is an intriguing idea. When I heard about it today, I quickly signed up for the beta test (we will see if a small business, like mine, gets accepted).
What is google getting out of it, besides more users of their system?
Goodwill in the market place, millions of little marketing opportunities, and distributed free technical support for their growing Gmail customer base.
If anyone can register a domain, sign-up with Gmail for Domains, market the service within their social sphere, while providing support and peripheral sales opportunities, it is a huge win for everyone.
Customers get an excellent e-mail experience. Businesses get to offer 1st class service. Google gets advertising traffic, market penetration, while offsetting from the technical support issues that comes with the growth.
I have 3 Mac Mini’s in our data center, running along side 3 Apple Xserves, and a 4th here on my desktop for development.
They are amazing little machines, and when tuned correctly, hum along nicely for just about any simple task.
Here are a few tips, based on my experience:
Edit the /etc/hostconfig file and use free utilities, to disable services like Crash Reports, Printing Services, Spotlight and Dashboard. I managed to get the core system to use less than 170 MB of memory.
Dump Apache for a light weight web server. Lighttpd is my preference, it is powerful, stunningly fast, and simple to configure.
Use memory caching to speed up dynamic content, using FastCGI or SCGI whenever possible. This will require you to rebuild PHP for FastCGI.
Build a true chroot ssh environment
Disable SSHv1 in /etc/sshd_config
Use scp with certificates to automate backup to a separate server. These are consumer machines so storing data on a separate partition does nothing.
Build and install all essential tools outside the paths known by Apple’s Software Update. I have seen Apple’s Software Update open up entire servers to hacks.
The secure.log will fill up with hack attempts the moment you put the machine on line, and you will be hacked, unless you take precautions beyond setting a few preferences in the OS X System Preferences.
Make sure you put the Mini behind an industrial strength firewall. The OS X firewall is decent, but if your data center does not provide ACL service, find one that does.
This blog is running on a Mac Mini, along with numerous other sites.
Robert Cringley, over at PBS.org, has an interesting piece on the legislative moves on behalf of supposedly fragile telcos.
This snippet, sums up my thoughts on the whole issue:
All the backbone providers can say is that bandwidth prices have gone so low they can no longer operate at a profit.
So go out of business, then. And if you don’t go out of business, explain to us why not.
Tim Bray’s mantra is also applicable to this issue:
Give me a Fat Pipe, Always On, Get Out of the Way
Exactly.
If telcos did just that, I would pay for it. A lot of people would, meaning big dollars for telcos.
Today, I pay $40/month for a cable line to the house. Not for television, just data.
Why don’t I pay SBC for anything?
Their pathetic network can’t even provide a 384K connection to my home, in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina.
Time Warner saw the market full of consumers like me, prepared for it and are grabbing the business.
Telcos, long used to everyoneneeding them, don’t have the culture to adapt in this environment. Instead they are asking businesses and Congress to protect them.
Isn’t it called a free market economy for a reason?
These telcos are a key reason other countries are passing us by in terms of broadband adoption.
Today’s desert island track, Super Bon Bon by Soul Coughing
Grooving, dark and powerful.
Today’s desert island disc is, Dark Side of the Moon from Pink Floyd.
An all time classic, which I first experienced as a child sitting on the bow of a speed boat, listening in the high fidelity of the original Walkman, as we sped across a lake.
iWeb is definitely an interesting product, with a lot of potential.
The potential being, ordinary people building beautiful websites.
The biggest mistake Apple made, was not including “Publish to FTP/SFTP”.
The other problem with iWeb sites, is that they chew through bandwidth. It is not a big deal for the hosting provider, but the customers are bound to get a surprise if (when) they burn through there alloted bandwidth, after posting the crazy cool video they edited with iMovie.
Apple has got to fix a few things:
Images, Video and Audio need to be optimized for delivery
CSS must be cleaned up
Remove the redundant index redirects when publishing outside .Mac
Spam detection software, running on the system “xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx”, has identified this incoming email as possible spam. The original message has been attached to this so you can view it (if it isn’t spam) or label similar future email. If you have any questions, see xxx@xxx.com for details.
Any filtering system that sends back this type of message, using the from address contained in spam messages, indicates that the administrator is a moron.
They are simultaneously compounding the problem and demonstrating their complete ignorance, regarding spam.
How much traffic consists of these messages? Ghosts in the machine, so to speak.
Equally, moronic, though not quite as bad, are the bounce messages sent by anti-virus software.
The chance of a human being reading these messages, and being capable of addressing the issue, are likely nil.
These messages simply add noise to the signal, we all try to maintain.
No doubt, this story is just getting started, already the dollars are growing though.
The fee of between one-fourth of a cent and one cent per message serves as a further incentive for senders to be conservative in their mail volume, Gingras said.
The original proposition was 1/4 of cent, here the CEO of Goodmail, suggests a range of up to 1 cent.
My hypothetical $250,000 a day for AOL, using Goodmail’s system, just grew to $1 million each day.
Considering postal rates, what marketing manager wouldn’t pay 5 or 10¢ per message for guaranteed delivery?
UPDATE – To be clear. I have no issue with companies generating revenue in this manner. Just don’t try to fold it into the battle against spam, as some cure-all for e-mails woes.
Why do people and companies add lame and unenforceable trailers to e-mail?
Exhibit 1
CONFIDENTIAL. The contents are also subject to copyright protection. Unless you are the addressee (or authorized by the addressee), you may not use, copy or disclose to anyone the contents of this message or attachments. If you have received the message in error, please advise the sender by reply e-mail or telephone (xxx-xxx-xxxx) and delete the message.
Exhibit 2
CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: The information in this electronic message (including any attachments) is confidential and may be privileged or proprietary. If you are not the intended recipient, any dissemination, disclosure, copying, downloading, or other use of the information is prohibited and unauthorized, and may be unlawful, regardless of address or routing. If you are not the intended recipient, please inform the sender immediately and permanently delete and destroy the original and any copies of this message, including any attachments.
I’m no lawyer, but logic suggests, that these are unenforceable, since the recipient had no way of reviewing the agreement prior to accepting or rejecting the terms (ie. receiving the message).
If a company or individual contacts me with one of these attached I ignore them.
Their attempt to exercise legal control of our conversation is unacceptable.
If what they are saying needs to be protected, e-mail is the wrong medium for its distribution.
In past projects, where we needed to group records, like users into groups, the traditional method was a has_and_belongs_to_many structure.
You would create a group, assign users as members of the group.
So Web 1.0, right?
In a recent project for managing e-mail, I experimented with loose relationships. We only looked up contacts when viewing a message. Never actually hard linking the message to a contact_id.
It was a great success, with contacts and messages managed independently, yet still providing relevancy to the content as users added new data to either entity.
On a new project, once again I am implementing group functionality. This time I am trying to use tags instead. Dangling them off the lowest leaf in the structure, the client, instead of as a parent or peer.
My hope is that this will simplify the creation of groups, and provide a simpler UI experience for the users.
A lot of people talk about UI design, but there are few examples of actual implementations.
What is the best way to manage habtm or has_one with 10,000 choices?
It would be nice if there was a site where the best practices are posted for discussion and reference.
America Online and Yahoo, two of the world’s largest providers of e-mail accounts, are about to start using a controversial system that gives preferential treatment to messages from companies that pay from 1/4 of a cent to a penny each to have them delivered. The senders must contact only people who have agreed to receive their messages, or risk being blocked entirely.
This is simply a new revenue scheme, an attempt to wall up their gardens, and the first real step towards breaking the internet.
The system they are proposing will do nothing to cut down on spam. Nothing.
Marketing companies, whom make big dollars sending spam, can and will pay the fee to insure delivery of their messages.
Small business and individuals will be taxed to communicate with anyone within these walled gardens.
If they get there way, nothing but walled gardens are in our future.
AOL and Yahoo want to charge extra to insure delivery of e-mail.
SBC wants to charge companies to deliver content to subscribers who already pay to access the very same content.
Google supposedly wants to create its own pseudo-internet.
No wonder the everyone in the world wants to wrestle control of the internet away from the U.S.
If American businesses do not assert a principle of Net neutrality, we will be forced to cede control to an international organization within the decade.
While catching up on some podcasts, I was reminded of the Xbox 360 Tracker, to which I promptly subscribed.
After watching the results over the last week, I found it interesting that while stock did show up quite regularly, the items for sale were never the standard Core or Live systems.
Instead, bundles were being sold, which included a plethora of accessories and games, and the prices rarely dropping below $900-1000.
One would expect the retailer to gouge consumers a little, given the scare inventory, but I think there is more here than meets the eye.
Depending on which press release you believe, either Microsoft purposely scaled back production to sustain interest and sales, or demand exceeded their goals.
We know from launch numbers, demand was luke warm in Asia, and dwarfed even by the ill-fated Sega Dreamcast launch in the states.
So why blow your lead and opportunity in this manner?
After observing this the launch over the last few months, I think this boils down to something simpler.
Financial survival.
Having lost millions on the first Xbox, and the reported cost of producing a 360 somewhere between $550 and $725 per unit, even Microsoft can’t afford to sell millions of standalone units.
By tightening supply, they’re encouraging retailers to help them offset the loss up front.
Knowing that the gamers will shy away from forced bundling experienced during previous console launches, they are simply counting on the instincts of the retailers to help them
Subliminal bundling.
In this way, Microsoft is softening the financial impact during the first few quarterly reports. Instead of having to trot out the tired “razor blade” excuse to justify the massive losses incurred during the launch.
