Category: technology

canon service sucks

daily life technology

Canon makes the cameras that I do like the most right now. As much as they products are great their US service is sucks. A little SD20 of mine failed: The lens is not able to open anymore and i get the dreadful E14 error. Canon says that this is due to sand. One could argue if putting a small camera into your pocket is considered use or abuse. But I did not want to argue. I just wanted to pay the 109 US for the repair. They have in theory a web interface for paying repairs. In reality this is a waste of time. Actually I feel not so good to have given this piece of web-junk my CC info. Despite 5 attempts with two different (and working) CC cards the site was unable to process my request.

The usual problem: Canon makes great products in Japan. Their US service part can be broken around the fringes: Will not put them out of business. Just a shame to see a world clas maker of amazing equipement having a website that works less than that of the muffler shop around the corner.

smart trash

daily life history technology

Not sure when this will happen, but I am pretty sure it will. Unless mankind abondons culture and civilistation for whatever reason.

When the trash can will be picked up it’s contents will be read via the RFID tags that every product will have. Now that makes for ample opportunity. The trash collectors can recycle, locate misplaced things for you and can sell your complete consumption profile to everybody who could benefit from it. From here it is pretty easy to figure out if you should change your diet or drink less. If your trash and credit card records don’t line up then that could mean allot of things.

A garbage truck costs tens of thousands of dollars, the technology needed to implement this will be only a few hundred once RFID tags are every where.

I’d say we better get the NSA back in check before they can wrap their -granted limited- imagination around these possibilies.

ps3 in September? better be, but probably wont

history Sony technology

PlayStation ‘HUB’ and a September Launch of PS3 in Japan and the US are been rumored here

Of course XBox Live needs competitions. Not sure what Sony can pull of till September. But it is indeed crucial. Like the whole thing. I think the PS3 release date is the one dimension of the watershed decission that is due this year: If they release in September or earlier and if PS3 as well as the online service are comparable to what’s out there right now then Sony might have a chance to survive. The quality of PS3 and online service are the other dimension.
Since nobody has seen anything yet, it can only be speculated upon.
But the fact that Sony has shown nothing since last years E3, and those images were clearly not from a real PS3 point in the direction that the PS3 will not be as great as Sony tried to make everybody believe last year.

If Sony had any images or release date then they would need to put this out right now in order disturb the momentum of the competing technologies: Every day people buy XBox 360s. These people will buy games for that machine, and not for the PS3. Decent hype around the PS3 could stop the ongoing proliferation of the 360 somewhat.

A friend of a friend said that there will be final devkits in June. If that would be true then a September launch is impossible. And that in turn mean that Sony is done. Toast. Over with. You probably can still buy a Flatpanel TV in 5 fives with those four letters on. But chances are that it’s actually from some chinese company that picked up the brand.

bad memory on a Mac and how to spot it

Apple confessions of a pixel pusher technology

If you machine freaks out at really random points then I would recommend testing it’s memory. The “Techtools deluxe” you find on the CD with the red edge you got from Apple appears to be pointless. Duing 15 minutes of beachballing I was able to click on 3 different messages, but it never worked. At least on the G5 that was broken today it was a complete waste of time.

I downloaded this very very nice memory tester
it it worked right away. Found the bad memory and that was that.

Here a little how to:
1. Install the program
2. Reboot your mac and hold command/apple S while the machine is coming up
3. You will be in the text based single user mode. Don’t be scared
4. type /Applications/memtest/memtest
(tip: hit tab or ESC twice to auto complete the command)
5. see what the test is saying: bad memory kicks out lots of error messages

web interface for exabyte LTO tape robot

confessions of a pixel pusher linux technology

When you buy the tape robot Exabyte Magnum 1×7 you can download a command line tool called
libTool to control it.

Since command line is not everybodies most favorite interface I wrote a little web interface for it.
It will show you which tape is where and can move tapes betweens slots, the drive and the door.

Drop me a line if you could use this. I wrote it, since there was nothing out there. It requires the libTool linux command line application and a webserver.

Razr V3, headset and custom ringtone

daily life technology

So I thought I get myself a bluetooth headset:

I know: headset’s are really stupid.
This one is the least stupid one I ever saw.
It’s pretty much original size in this image.
Weighs less than 10 grams.
Decent Battery life, although the Razr drains it’s battery faster.
Audio quality is ok, so I hear. I don’t talk to myself.
Have not tried it with skype yet.
Usability is great: 1 button.
1 led.
That’s enough to do voice dial, switch between calls etc etc.

Then I read that you can use any mp3 as a ringtone.
It works as long you don’t have a bluetooth headset.
Yepp, that is right:
If you have a headset then you can only use the standard
ringtones. Somebody gotta explain that one to me.
Motorola, not really known for being smart …

: undefined reference to `mysql_connect’

linux technology 

gcc -o mysqlclient mysqlclient.c  -L /usr/lib/mysql/ -lmysqlclient -lz
/tmp/ccllX580.o(.text+0x40): In function `main':
: undefined reference to `mysql_connect'

mysql_connect is old news.

I am writing a mysql client in C. Since it has been a while I am googling for simple templates, and only found an ancient one at first. Google likes old pages.
Then I found this example chapter of the Mysql book by Dubois. I read it, it’s great. The best book I know on the matter. By leaps and bounds better than the O’Reilley one.
Anyhow. I think there was a source CD. Maybe not. Wouldn’t it be great if you get the example code and reference material online. Of course people might not buy the book then. Simple solution: Print on every page little and subtle line numbers. The web site serving the source code would ask occassionally: “please enter the seond work of line 45 on page 315”. If you get it right you get a couple of more page views. Mildly annoying, but better than looking for the CD.
Actually you could put the entire book online like this.

A Book also makes a pretty good dongle.

and you thought 2 finger trackpad scrolling was cool?

technology

Right now they call it multi touch interaction.

The mouse was the best solution as long there was nothing better. Much like a rotary dial phone: It’s time rolling back to the initial position was a neat hack to dial numbers mechanically. A mouse was a neat hack to position things on the screen. Even though you moved something else than the actual pointer. Back then.

the end of Sony (again)

media Sony technology

Another perspective on Sony’s problems.
It is indeed tru that Blue-Ray has less bandwidth than recent DVD implementations. What’s the point in BlueRay?
Just the capacity? H264 compression will help there.

the yin and yang of google

google marketing technology

I don’t get it they must be too smart for me. I can not see how this would be anything that google would be doing and why this makes any sense.

—

On the other hand this makes allot of sense
Imagine you are a small company: You pay some MS Exchange Expert and Microsoft quiet some money just to have email. Most features you would want you might get for free via “caribou”. Or for very little money.

I think it would make sense if the service is free. Eyeballs pay for it. Support could cost money. Putting ads in
outgoing email would be a big ‘nono’. Being a small company you don’t want to expose that you use a cheap/free service for email.