Category: misc

iDidntForget (stupid!)

Apple internet misc

Apple makes awesome products. Since years I spend most of my waking hours on their respective recent laptops. That part works so well. The iPhone is alright. I had better phones that worked much better as a phone. But that might be AT&Ts issue. And it kinda works.

Apples online user management is ridicolous though. I keep lots of passwords to lots of sites. And nowhere do I have the amount of trouble that Apple gives me. It never is clear if their different services share the same credentials. Changing / retrieving it is a nightmare. The whole user experience is just broken. I think that happens if you have one part of your business doing really well: You can afford to be sloppy in another. And I am sure that Steve never has to reset his password. And many people are having trouble managing their passwords. So they will not blame Apple for their broken system. I can, since things work on all other major sites and system for me. But not in Apple Land.

I never was intrigued by .mac and so I skipped looking at MobileMe. Which turned out to be a good thing. I wonder if Apple will be able to turn this around. But looking at their websites and it’s vast collection of broken links and outdated developer documentation I have serious doubts that this will be ever better.

apple on the web

Apple internet misc

No wonder the introduction of “mobileMe” was such a disaster. I, like most people, have registrations with many websites. From pointless things to online banking. Even though there is no official or firm standard for registration on websites certain practises emerged. And overall things work.

With one exception:

Apple.

Their web site registration mechanism for developers is broken. Not by one main outage or problem. More in the million paper cuts kind of way.

* passwords expire
* passwords have odd ‘security’ restrictions. Of course you have to try a password to see that the system complains about something
* loging in to one part of the system does NOT mean that you have access to another, or that you just changed password would be working there.

Apples own website is pretty dismal overall, once you go beyond the home and apple store pages: Broken links clutter the whole thing. Links that go nowhere are an inherent problem of the internet. But having them within a company website is just lame. A million paper cuts. Not fun to repeat each one of them. But the mobileMe disaster did not come not as a surprise.

Other areas of Apple are vastly ahead of the game and the competition. The internet is certainly not one of them.

test post

misc

this is just a test.

INTERDUBS and charging per Gigabyte

interdubs misc

INTERDUBS does not charge for storage. No matter how many Gigabytes you need, it is included in the $285 flat rate. Since there is no financial incentive to clean up, some of my customers amassed quiet a backlog of material.

Which actually was somewhat intended: Other tools were more important than the means to clean up and keep the data pool fresh. With Terrabytes stored -and much of it actually no longer needed- this situation changed. Adding tools to simplify clean up was easy. The database had already all needed information.

Getting people to use them was a different matter though. Somehow I got lucky and had what turned out to be the right idea: Between Sunday and yesterday I had a ‘cleanup drive’ in INTERDUBS. Clients with allot of old material were encouraged to delete as much as possible of it. As an incentive INTERDUBS donates to charity relative to the amount of Gigabytes cleaned up.

And it actually worked rather well: People put in allot of work to clean up their backlog of material, and they did so knowing that it was for a good cause.
In total INTERDUBS will pay for 240 vaccinations.

This little detail is also nice, since I had no idea that this solution would emerge when I decided not to charge for storage. If I can continue to run a flat rate based on the efforts like this then I will be very happy.

golden dragon

misc

a better place

daily life misc

The world would be a better place if people looking for a free spot in a parking structure only wait for a car to exit after that car is showing the lights indicating that it is in rear gear. If those white lights are not on yet then you just pass it. Simple.

amazing

misc politics


Bush: We have a dollar that’s adjusting, and I am for a strong dollar. One reason I am for a strong dollar is because I want, you know, people to — I think it helps deal with inflation.

When this man came into office it took 90 american cents ot buy a Euro. Now it’s 155 of those.

“I am for a strong dollar”

Funny that the that seems not to be enough. It’s not God setting the dollar course. It’s how many of them you print. If you print to many then they are worth less. If you print less then the they are worth more. Simple.

Blu-Ray it is

misc

Warners must feel pretty powerful today. Just a couple of weeks after they threw their hat in the ring it’s all over. Once the stalemate was tilting it took surprising little time for everybody to jump on the winning side. I wonder how quickly one can start reading that Blu-Ray was in any way better than HD-DVD. Of course it was not. Both formats were identical. My theory is that now folklore will be created that Blu-Ray was better, and therefor won. Truth is -and shall remain- that Sony “just” did the better maneuvering and somehow got Warners on board in the right moment. Good that this part of media technology history is over. Now comes the real uphill battle: Blu-Ray vs DVD and the fact that people have more choices to entertain themselves than there seems to be Plastics around.

“Plastics. Benjamin, Plastics”

Fucking Apple

Apple misc

We have this Laptop that has a glitch. The backlight goes out if you hold it wrong. It’s an older maching (iBook 600Mhz) and it got replaced. But today I wanted to get it going as a server again. It’s a unix computer. And 600Mhz is plenty to serve a couple of web pages. It runs OS X 10.3.9, that’s as long it has not been updated. Now I try to get it on the Apple Airport. And, that is the problem: It does not. Beachball for a while, and then the error message:

There was an error joining the AirPort network "yournamehere"
Tray again // OK

What the fuck!
Frst: that “Try again” is bullshit. It has never worked. Never ever.

Secondly: What exactly was the error? I am sure the computer knows a little bit more than ‘error’.
The Airport works just fine, so it can talk to two computers right now. So why writes Apple code that is retarded in that it does not give you the slightest hint what the problem might be. I don’t expect a hex dump to be slapped into each users face. But somewhere, maybe in a log file (!) the machine could give me a hint what it would be upset about. It’s one thing that Apple stuff does not work with Apple stuff. But to be quiet about any causes or reasons is just plain stupid and ignorant. Fucking Apple Computers. There are other companies being equally crap. Just that Apple runs around with this attitude of being better and user friendly. Actually they are not. They are just better liars:

Ten years ago Apple introduced the iMac. Which is a great machine. And a great concept. Watch in the end of this 7 minute clip how that man calls a circular (!!) piece of plastic “the most wonderful mouse you have ever used”. It’s exactly this arrogant attitude that makes Apple so annoying.

Happy New Year

misc

google gaming became a 24/7 operation

Apple’s market share continues to grow