Category: Apple

Biting the feeding hand

This is one of the braver statements [WSJ, subscription required] that I’ve seen from Steve Jobs recently: “We’re baffled that a settlement imposed against Microsoft for breaking the law should allow, even encourage, them to unfairly make inroads into education — one of the few markets left where they don’t have monopoly power.”

The new culture

I’ve mentioned before that my writing style has changed since switching over to News Items. Part of that, I think, is due to the fact that I was usually creating news items in the browser, which makes me want to write less. Part is that my reading style has changed too.

I used to read TidBITS pretty frequently. After all, I got it via email. A few email addresses ago I stopped receiving it, and I forgot about it. But then I found this article about the recent unpleasantness with the iTunes installer. It’s well written, insightful, and strikes to the heart about what’s interesting and new about Mac OS X.

Mac OS X is a tremendous hybrid, with all the vigor and personality quirks that that implies. It has traditional Mac applications and all the power of Unix. And it has people from both operating systems coming to the platform. Now there’s lots of opportunities for conflict (Unix guy: “What kind of idiot names their directories with leading spaces and funny characters?” Mac guy: “What kind of moron digs an appplication that you have to type at the command line to use?”), but also opportunities for tremendous benefits when you combine both approaches to computing. Programming and using Mac OS X is like taking part in the creation of a new culture. Pretty darn cool, actually.

DVD + TV + 10.1 = …

Success, if you follow the directions in this thread on the Apple Discussions board. I don’t know whether the URL works for sure, but if it doesn’t, try discussions.info.apple.com and go to the board Mac OS X –> DVD Player and look for the thread “Powerbook DVD Playback WORKS!!!!”

Or try this: Shut your Powerbook down. Connect the TV to the video out port (preferably S-Video). Restart and before the screen comes on, close the lid of the Powerbook. The Powerbook should start up and only use the TV as the monitor. After it displays the boot panel, you should be able to open the laptop and use the keyboard and trackpad again. You should be able to play back the DVD now on the TV.

As for why the PowerBook won’t play back the DVD normally with a TV connected, I don’t know and Apple isn’t telling. But my money’s on the MPAA. I don’t know of any other organization that goes so far to make sure that you can’t enjoy its products. Oh yeah, there’s the RIAA too…
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Light Blogging Day

Probably another light blogging day. I’ve gotten into the part of the semester where, despite my best efforts, every day is a fire drill.

Unfortunately I can’t post my current assignment to my blog–it’s too long and the subject matter (forgiveness vs. utilitarianist philosophy) is a little too far out to try to make work as blog matter. Maybe later I’ll figure out how to tie it all together.

Quick pointer: Esta talks about hooking my grandfather up on e-mail this morning. Esta’s always been better than I have about keeping family ties close, and this story shows why.

Update: I finally received my replacement power adapter (see the discussion of my fire hazard problem here). Fortunately my problem was in the AC cord and not the “yo-yo” itself. Apple made an incremental change to the adapter recently that rendered the plug incompatible with the receptacle on my PowerBook G3. However, the AC cord is compatible with my old yo-yo, and it’s charging merrily even as we speak. So to sum up: if your yo-yo is broken and it’s a model M7332, make sure you replace it with an adapter that’s designed for your G3. However, if it’s your AC cord, you can order either one and it will work.

Interestingly, both models are “Model M7332.” But the one that works with mine is manufactured by Delta Electronics in Thailand and the new one comes from Dongguan Samsung Electro-Mechanics.

Dumber Than a Box of Hammers?

UPDATE 1:45 PM EDT: A few links are surfacing that are pretty authentic about Apple’s new digital device, the iPod: a Firewire capable, ultraslim, hard disk based digital music player. Plus version 2 of my favorite Mac application, iTunes… Here’s the MacCentral coverage. Finally Apple’s page on the device is up. And you can get it at the Apple store.

First things first: a prayer request for an old family friend, Berkeley Brandt, who (as reported by Esta) suffered a stroke over the weekend–he’s 30 with a wife and two children.

In less sad news, as pointed out by my fellow Virginia alum Tim Fox, there are still drunken confrontations aplenty in Charlottesville. Of particular note:

According to police, as the students rounded the apartment building, they heard the sound of a weapon being racked. At this time they saw Dixon who pointed a long gun at them and said, “Boy where you going? I’ll f—ing shoot you.”

Some students fled at the sight of the weapon. Others, thinking Dixon only held an air gun, stood their ground, some pulling shirts over their faces for protection, and told him to go ahead and fire, police said.

A few of us were discussing this on an email list. I put forward the question, “were the fraternity kids in question [Douglas] Adams fans or just dumber than a box of hammers??” Fortunately for all of us Erik Simpson knew the answer to that:

First, the lads were not Douglas Adams fans. They could not answer even the most basic questions about Mr. Adams or his work. That part was easy.

Ha-HA! you say. They are therefore dumber than a box of hammers!

That, it turns out, is only partially true. We know, aswim as we are in the most enlightened notions of our day, that we cannot rank the intelligence of people (or groups of fraternal Wahoos or boxes of hammers) on a simple linear scale. We must instead evaluate multiple, independent kinds of intelligence.

First, you should know that Mr. Jarrett’s box of hammers, which I found in the back closet of his trendy Cambridge pad, is a rough-hewn pine box, about 18 inches by 12 by 8, and it contiains five hammers ranging from a tiny plastic toy hammer to a large Craftsman (TM) carpenter’s claw-headed job. The others are a ball-peen hammer, an artist’s mallet, and a small jeweler’s hammer. The specific identities of the fraternal Wahoos are much less important, of course, because they’re all pretty much the same. Statistically speaking.

Given the story about the gun and the T-shirts, you would probably guess that the hammers outstrip the Wahoos in spatial/mechanical intelligence. Boy, do they. In that area, even the tiny plastic toy hammer proved vastly more intelligent than all of the Wahoos. The only category the hammers dominated more convincingly was that of emotional intelligence.

The Wahoos, however, proved marginally more adept than their inanimate counterparts at answering basic math problems. They also demonstrated significantly larger vocabularies (when asked the right sort of questions, at any rate), and they generally carried the day in visual memory and musical aptitude as well. A prominent exception: none of the Wahoos could carry a tune like the ball-peen hammer.

I could go on, but you get the picture: in the specific kind of intelligence at work in the story, yes, the students involved were clearly dumber than Mr. Timothy O. Jarrett’s box of hammers, and the difference meets all standards of statistical significance. Overall, however, we can only say that the hammers and the Wahoos have different strengths and weaknesse. If anything, the students are on the whole roughly *as dumb* as the box of hammers but not demonstrably dumber. And we should point out that–as we would all expect–Mr. Timothy O. Jarrett’s box of hammers is remarkably bright as boxes of hammers go.

Rock Solid OS, Jell-O Economy

Glenn Fleischman wrote this review of Mac OS X 10.1.

I’ve already posted my thoughts about the upgrade, but it’s worth repeating. Mac OS X 10.1 is my everyday operating system. At any given time I’m running half a dozen apps — Mozilla, TextEdit, iTunes, Word Test Drive, GraphicConverter, Palm Desktop, Excel, OmniOutliner, Mail and/or Eudora — and it’s been smooth. That’ s not taking account of the ssh server, Postgres SQL server, and streaming audio server that are running (generally unused) in the background. Last night I watched “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” in a window while I did some email and web surfing — the other activities were a little slower but the DVD didn’t drop any frames. Very cool.

Life Without Wheels

We’re going to try living without a car for a while starting in December. It’s not like it’s a totally new concept for us, since we have mostly been walking or using public transportation since we got here. But now we won’t have a safety net.

I’ve been thinking about trying Zipcar. We did a project on them for my marketing class, but if anyone out there has experience with them, I’d appreciate hearing it.

Dot-Com Love in the Time of Cholera

It’s an interesting time to be involved in entrepreneurial classes and organizations (like e-MIT). There’s a huge article in the New York Times this morning about the withering away of venture capital. It echoes things I’ve heard before. We had a senior executive from Softbank visit last spring. He had interesting things to say about his job, like coming home and having to tell his kids that they pulled the plug on Kozmo.com. Like I said last week–lots of heartbreak all around.

A little too late to make the early edition–this brilliant article at Textism going a lot farther than I did about some of the insanity of the last three years. “You, sir, are irrelevant, irrelevant, irrelevant.”

Printing without wires

So at long last I finally got our laser printer working on our wireless network. It was a little bit of a pain in the butt, so I thought I’d share the process with you.

The architecture of the solution, when all was said and done, was pretty simple. LaserJet with JetDirect card, connected via Ethernet cross-connect cable to Airport base station (dialup only), set up as an Ethernet bridge (thanks to Henry B for pointing this out). But getting there was pretty difficult.

First thing that we had to do was get a print server card for the printer. The LaserJet 2100M/TN doesn’t come with Ethernet connectivity, so connecting it to the wireless network required a JetDirect card. The standard card from HP is called the JetDirect 600N. Unfortunately it comes in about five flavors, depending on the type of networking you need to do. The cheapest model on E-Bay is the 3112. Unless you have some TokenRing needs, make sure you don’t buy this model. The one we finally ended up getting is the 3111a, which has 10Base-T and 10Base-2 support in addition to Appletalk (via the old fashioned serial connection). The card fit in the standard EIO slot in the LaserJet printer.

My initial plan was to connect the card to our AirPort base station using an old Intel 4-port 10BaseT hub we had lying around. Unfortunately, this didn’t work too well–we couldn’t address the card. I printed a test page for the JetDirect card and saw that the IP address and gateway were manually set to an unusual number–no doubt the settings required to run it in its previous home. But I couldn’t correct the settings from Mac OS X. I booted into OS 9 and connect to the JetDirect server using a crossover cable. I was able to reset TCP/IP to automatically get a DHCP address. However, when I reconnected the card through our hub, it didn’t seem to get an address. I then manually set the IP address, but still couldn’t address it.

Finally, I had to move the Airport base station to the other side of the room so that I could connect it using the 10-foot crossover cable directly to the printer. Almost immediately, I found it accessible via AppleTalk–apparently our hub was broken. I was able to set up an LPR printer to it, and we downloaded software from HP onto Lisa’s Windows 95 laptop so that she could connect to it as well.

All in all it only took about six weeks… Boy, I really must be a programmer now. Hardware and networking things used to seem easier.

One last note–I’ll have to get another hub if high speed broadband ever comes to our neighborhood–connecting directly to the base station won’t work too well then.

It’s a Big Scripting Party

Yesterday’s piece on using AppleScript to update a Manila blog interested a lot of people, thanks largely to Dave‘s link to my page. A typical story on my site might accrue 10 hits the first day it’s posted. This one garnered 559. Which leaves open the question: by writing that little script and telling Dave about it, was I just shamelessly whoring for hits? Hopefully a few people downloaded the script and found it worthwhile.

I’d like to issue a public invitation to all the people who are interested in using Apple’s new RPC capabilities with Manila. Let’s have a discussion about what would be the most valuable scripts to write and what would add the most value. I’ll kick it off: I think that (a) automatic spellchecking prior to posting and (b) ability to post image files directly from the Finder to my blog would be great things to have. What do you think?

I’d also like to point out that there are people doing similar things for Blogger. Following my referer links, I just came across this script at Web Entourage. It’s smarter than my script–it uses the selected text from any application. This is cool. I’m learning more about Applescript (I’ll be the first to admit I’m pretty illiterate in it) and about the other people out there who are doing this stuff.

I like the WebEntourage web page better than the page that shows off my script, since he links clearly to the API and to Blogger. I wonder if there could be some way to pull out the links from a Manila message automatically and format them for display somehow, like what Slashdot does.


In non-scripting news…

Today is the fourth anniversary of my wedding to Lisa. We got a lovely e-card yesterday from our dear friend Larry Mueller. I sang with Larry in college and he read at our wedding.

Getting the email from him, I realized it’s been far too long since I spoke with a few of my friends like Larry. Distance is pretty hard to conquer when you’re a student. I think it’s ironic that as my ability to write for my blog has improved, my letter writing skills have diminished.

A long day today. Lots of coursework. I have to keep reminding myself that corporate finance is worth all the trouble.

A Long Awaited Upgrade

The title of this piece comes from “A Long Awaited Party,” the first chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien. I’ve been re-reading it lately. It has some interesting things to say today about the value of innocence and protecting it: it’s better if the innocents stay safe even if they are ignorant about the dangers around them. For me, that puts all the ranting I used to do about the uninformed American public in an entirely new light.

So, Mac OS X 10.1. As someone pointed out on Slashdot, a pleonasm of a version number. But a heck of a good operating system.

Where do I begin? The trip to Northshore for the disc was pretty humorous. Lisa had something else to see in the mall and left me alone at the front door of the Apple Store. Words don’t do the place justice. How about ten-foot glass panes suspended on wires from the ceiling and floor displaying the Aqua interface? Shelves and shelves of software? All the current hardware on display, plus “digital hub” accessories? Heck of a retail experience.

I asked the floor guy where I found the upgrade, and he said, “Oh, that’s back at the Genius Bar. I’ll walk you back there.” He went back and told one of the Mac Geniuses (yes, that’s a job title) that I needed the upgrade. The Genius said “Stand back a little.” Wondering, I did, and he tossed the package to me like a frisbee. “There you go,” he said.

The actual install wasn’t nearly as fun, but it also wasn’t onerous. I left it alone for about half an hour (I think I accidentally had it include resources for a bunch of other languages, or it probably would have been faster). On boot, the login screen defaulted to listing all the users in the system with pictures next to them. Pick a login name, then type in a password. Great for home users. I promptly changed the setting back to force people to type in a username. I take my laptop everywhere and it makes me feel better that if my laptop walks off the person will have to know my login name before he can do anything with it.

So, logging in: the login window shows a spinning progress bar now and stays open until a few seconds before the Dock appears. The Dock is now hidden by default. The battery, clock, volume, and Airport indicators are now in the menu bar and their Dockling counterparts are gone. I mean gone–not on my hard drive any more. A little disconcerting, but I can get over it. I open an application and am knocked back in my seat, it’s that fast. And they’re all fast. And that’s really cool. Mozilla is more stable now when compared with the same build running under 10.0.4.

What about that whole SOAP/XML-RPC thing? I go to Apple’s scripting site for OS X and download the Script Menu. Drag it to the menu bar to install it. Pull it down–there’s a few Internet services already there. Select “Temperature by Zip Code.” Type in my zip. Within about a second (over a dialup line) it tells me what the temperature is outside. Not a gee whiz demonstration, but it did it all using a Web service and SOAP. No browser had to be open.

Apple released the manual for programming this interface yesterday. I might have something to say about how it all works later this week. Right now I have to go watch a DVD. Which, by the way, I no longer have to reboot to do.

 

On a completely different note, mahna mahna! Also, Esta has some hilarious things to say about pickled squirrels today…

Getaway in Maine

Sorry about the cryptic message that was on the site over the weekend. I was trying to demonstrate the workings of this website to classmates of mine and I inadvertently flipped the homepage. I figured that, rather than leave it blank, I would put something up temporary and change it later. Shortly afterwards I hopped in a car and we drove to Maine. 🙂

Lisa and I were in Bar Harbor over the weekend. It’s a gorgeous little village on a small island off the mid-coast of Maine. We got there about 9:30 pm on Friday and all was dark, cold and windy. A pint of porter from the local brewery took some of the cold away and we enjoyed some excellent mussels and clam chowder.

In the morning, I was astonished to see how close the water was all around us. A quick breakfast followed by some driving and we were at the top of Cadillac Mountain, a huge outcropping of pink granite rock at the center of Acadia National Park in the center of the island. We walked around the top of the mountain and continued on the park loop road to the Sand Beach.

(A quick word about the history of the park: Bar Harbor used to be a home for the rich and famous. To prevent overdevelopment of the island, the residents, including some Rockefellers, donated the bulk of the eastern half of the island to the US government to create a national park. The park is encircled by a loop road, reminiscent of the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland.)

From Sand Beach we hiked about 1.5 mi south to Otter Point and were treated along the way to spectacular views of the water and the rocks. Returning to Sand Beach, we climbed more or less straight up a rock face to the headland protecting the beach. More spectacular views, some aching muscles. We headed back for dinner and some sleep in town. Sunday we had an excellent breakfast on the (somewhat heated) front porch of the 2 Cats restaurant and inn (featuring a note from Martha Stewart by the cash register!), and began the long drive back.

We made only one stop on the way home–the Apple Store in the Northshore Mall in Peabody, Massachusetts, where I picked up my copy of Mac OS X 10.1. I’m using it now and it’s spectacular. All the rock solid performance of the original version (maybe more so), great DVD playback, and fast. I’ll write some more notes about the new OS tomorrow. For now, I’ll just say: drive to your closest Apple Store or CompUSA or order your copy on the online store. You’ll thank yourself for doing it.

More or Less Back to Normal

UPDATES
Eudora Welty has died at age 92…

ORIGINAL STORY
Things are just about back to normal here. Starting early this Friday, I got a bunch of hits (2000 pageviews and counting, up from a normal baseline of 30-40 for a really good article) to the site from MacInTouch and Scripting News readers, looking at my article on SOAP and XML-RPC in Mac OS X 10.1. I think that I scared most of them off from returning with Friday’s piece, though.

For the record, this site isn’t about the Mac, or travelling, or Seattle. It’s more about me and what I’m going through. So you can expect to see me ramble on about a number of topics at any given time. I do recognize, however, that people reading the site may want a little more structure than that. So I’ve added some links in the Navigation area that pull together stories on topics about which I tend to write more frequently. If you’re interested in this site just for one of those topics, you can now bookmark the topic page of your choice. If you don’t mind reading all my chaos, by all means come back to the home page.

Seattle Update

This Saturday I got really sore. I probably should have learned my lesson after last weekend’s exercise in pain management. I was back in Lake Union again on Saturday, this time kayaking with the other MBA interns at my company. We went a little further in the kayaks than I did before in the rowboat. If you look at this map (provided by the Moss Bay Rowing and Kayaking Center, who rented us the canoes), we started at the point marked with the cross and paddled around to a point near the Museum of History and Industry, then back. It was an overcast day, so I was spared the utter blistering sunburn I should have had after three hours on the open water without sunscreen. But I did really pull something in my right arm, so that even today I’m finding it hard to lift anything heavy, move my fingers, or apply a lot of pressure with my hand.

Sunday was a little more painless: I attended Bite of Seattle with a few friends. I was a little apprehensive, but it turned out to be a much better event than similar ones I’ve attended in Washington, DC and other places. The food was much better (although I still got a little sick on something I ate) and the crowds were less crazy. I did get sunburned on Sunday, but not too badly.