When you are planning on doing a buildout in Los Angeles, do not use Acco. They suck beyond believe. There are not many things you can do wrong with AC. One of them confusing in and out on a system. Certainly that’s what happened at a quarter million dollar job.
Category: technology
as /etc/httpd/httpd.conf will tell you in
DocumentRoot “/Library/WebServer/Documents”
the Document Root under OS X is under /Library/WebServer/Documents.
Of course you need to enable the oddly named “Personal Web Sharing”
in the system preferences under network.
People like symmetry. More than you would gues. I would not be surprised if there would be more positive voices around the ISS, now that it has reached a certain size. Not looking like being a biplane attempt of the 7 year old darth vader might help that device up there that is under construction for so long now.
Bush will probably want to go there or something along those lines.
The SE was great. 2,500 Deutsche Mark, even after buying it via a student friend of mine, was allot of money. But it was a computer that you could buy books about. It was actually documented. That I had only seen like this for a Sun.
The LC and Newton I bought in an impulse. I lived 400 Meters from a Mac dealer back in the day. Which there were like 5 or so in the whole god damn country. Played a little bit of Myst on it. Started to develop for the Newton. But it was so odd and different from any API I cared about that I declared it a waste or time. And money I might add.
Power Macintosh I got a work. Slow like hell.
Powerbook Titanium I got at work as well. My boss brought it in one day. And I was very very very happy. Then, after the while, the hinge just snapped off. Apple pretended that that would never happen. Machine got hot, but was nice otherwise. Miss it.
iBook I got for my wife. Old CPU rev, real cheap. Worked great. I think she made the mistake of opening and
closing it though: the backlight display failed
iPod 1st Gen. Failed by now. Was ok though.
PowerBook Al 12″. Nice. But hot.
PowerBook Al 15″. Smoothest Mac I owned. Had to leave it when I left that job. Which was a shame.
iPod 3rd Gen: Broken. Those 4 buttons in the row are such a bad idea!
iBook G4. Mac I bought in 1995 working on my own in the US again. (I had in Germany before 1997). Nice machine. Real nice. Would still use it, would it’s keyboard not have failed.
iPod Shuffle: refurb, started to listen to podcasts on that one. Not ideal.
iPod Nano: Nice. Refurb, which made it an awesome deal. Left the connection cable in Germany last week though. So I will probably pay alsmost as much for that then I paid for the nice.
MacBook Pro: Tis ok. First Gen. Get’s hot like hell. Disabled spotlight and it helped somewhat.
MacBook: For the wife. Unusable with 512MB or memory. With 1.5GB I have not have heard any complaints. About the computer. (joke that is not true, but was unavoidable in a way)
iPod Hifi: emberrassing. Only used it one day, scaring kids with it during Halloween. Expensive for what it is. Can not even find a tuner for it, which would make it a decent looking kitchen radio. Seing it in the store the other day I was shocked how much I had paid for it.
NTX: First laser I owned. And loved. Got it as part of payment in a job back in the day. Still runs and makes ozone. Is entirely yellow by now.
How odd that I can recount my life by Apple products I used / owned.
Will I buy an iPhone? Certainly not. I am looking forward to it’s release. So that I go publish with the Interdubs-iPhone features, and since Razr prices will go down. It’s an ok phone, that works and that I am used to. If I want more I use a computer. There is no room for an intbetween. I never used a PDA or Blackberry. And UMPCs still make me laugh.
My life in Apple. How weird.
When there is no wifi the iPhone is depending on AT&Ts EDGE technology to get data over the cell phone network. Bandwidth for that is supposed to be 70Kbps to 135Kbps. In other words. It is 11 to 22 times slower than a T1 line. Download wise many consumer DSLs are around T1 speed. So people that are used to ‘high speed internet’ and expecting the same from an iPhone everywhere are in for a surprise.
Since a couple of happy months I have been using EVDO on my laptop. In the rare cases that the Bandwidth dropped below 200Kbps I stopped using the Internet. It was just too painful.
Being a child of the last century, and having built machines, that, well, actually build machines, I might have unusual high interest in things how actually get made. Looking at America in 2007 you might think that it needs is marketing and malls to provide people with ‘stuff’. But there is this little -often ugly- detail: ‘stuff’ needs to get made. And before that, it has to be engineered. Mostly elsewhere.
This brief intro to zfs I had linked to in the last entry already. As it turns out, I was a bit naive in thinking that Apple would just implement zfs in leopard. If I understand this clarification correctly then ZFS will be READ ONLY in Leopard. Which makes it pointless for all real life uses I had in mind. Or that most people ever would have had in mind. Why bother? Apple is an odd company, certainly not one that behaves logical in some areas of it’s efforts. Sometimes it just behaves like a spoiled Trust-a-fari. Who needs reason if the iPod sales just keep the ATM filled up for you?
In the meantime Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz invites Linus Torwalds to dinner in response to his post about Sun.
What I do like about this story is how much of it happens in the open for everybody to see. In a more upbeat perspective there seems to be one big global “Forum Romanum” these days.
A brief story about the beginnings of Photoshop. Interesting, I had no idea that Pixar made computers. Which is a bit embarrassing, considering what I do for a living. Well, now I know.
Somehow there is this long history of really small screens. And most of them were failures. OK, Sony became known by shipping a load of portable TVs via one of the first 747s to NYC. But apart from that, the watchman wasn’t really that sucessful. Neither was the iPod with video capabilities. There are actually much better devices in terms of screen size or price. But none of them really caught on. I think the problem is, that there is no real content and need for such a device. It’s technical feasibility seems to lure people into thinking otherwise. But how often do you find yourself wishing to watch a couple of quare inch screen? When? As much as the original walkman concept of having a mobile music source with headphones was a hit the mobile visual pendant is a miss. It’s not flying. And I honestly doubt that the iPhone will change that. Nothing will. How many of your chat sessions are video chats? Exactly. Yet, the picture-phone had the same feasibility driven shadow life for a while. Lateral progress I would call these things: Something is a hit. And then people just extend the concept to the side. Cinemas add first sound and then color. Both times it’s been well perceived. Smelling is another sense! Just that it did not work. Walkman -> Watchman. Same deal. Ears are happy with a walkman on, let’s feed the eyes now. It’s probably easy to pitch. Stupid board member can ‘see’ this simple lateral extensions. As Homer Simpson said “They have the internet on computers now”
This is a neat little overview how the internet is doing.
Some other links that do similar things: UCI.edu Internet Traffic Report And nice cross matrix between different providers.