trucks, cars, kitchens and microwaves,

Apple history technology

Steve Jobs said at this years D8 conference:


When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks because
that’s what you needed on the farms.” Cars became more popular
s cities rose, and things like power steering and automatic
transmission became popular.

“PCs are going to be like trucks,” Jobs said.
“They are still going to be around.” However, he said,
only “one out of x people will need them.”

I agree on the part that iPad like devices will liberate
people from using computers that didn’t want them in
the first place. And there are more than we think.
I think Apple will make a killing by recognizing this with
the iPad.

I like the historical analogy. However I find this one
to be more fitting: Computers are like kitchens, and
iPads are like micro wave ovens. A microwave will
work against your hunger. You are dependent on
pre made things that you have to purchase at a price.
It is easy, but you have not much chance to control
the experience.

A kitchen is more complex to operate than a microwave.
But the food tastes better. It is healthier and cheaper.
And the varieties of experiences is endless.

gmail advanced search

google

I had no idea this exists: Google advanced search which I can see being very useful.

no surprise here

economy free of any reason internet

people don’t know how fast their Internet is

I hope that it takes a while before the couple of last mile vendors adopt their upgrade plans accordingly.

ldap_sasl_bind(SIMPLE): Can’t contact LDAP server (-1)

linux

On a centos machine ldapsearch was not giving me much love when accessing a Microsoft Global directory server via ldaps and a given port. The error message I got was:


ldap_sasl_bind(SIMPLE): Can't contact LDAP server (-1)

When turning up debug level via -d 1 as in


ldapsearch -d 1 -v -H ldaps://servername:portnumber

I got the bit more revealing error message:


TLS certificate verification: Error, unable to get local issuer certificate
TLS trace: SSL3 alert write:fatal:unknown CA
TLS trace: SSL_connect:error in SSLv3 read server certificate B
TLS trace: SSL_connect:error in SSLv3 read server certificate B
TLS: can't connect: error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed (unable to get local issuer certificate).

It turns out that a simple line like


TLS_REQCERT never

in ldap.conf makes things better. In my particular install a simple ‘locate ldap.conf’ was a bit misleading. The true location of your config file can be revealed via:


strace ldapsearch -v -H ldaps://servername:portnumber 2>&1 | grep ldap.conf

IR controler on ATV update

Apple technology

An Apple TV box stopped reacting to the IR when being back in the Apple interface. The light was still changing colors when a button was pressed, but nothing happened. This forum post describes perfectly shows how to get the IR working again. Since it would be a shame if these clear and wonderful instructions would fall prey to data rot here a (slightly amended) copy of them:

1) if you have not already, patchstick the ATV

2) ssh to the atv

(Steps 3 and 4 will fail if you have set the ATV to not auto update its software, since mesu.apple.com will resolve to 127.0.0.1)
3) download the IR firmware update utility: wget http://mesu.apple.com/data/IR/061-3045.20080708.Aq12D/IRReceiverUpdaterTool2

4) download the firmware image: wget http://mesu.apple.com/data/IR/694-5586.20081119.2AvT3/irrxfw-0x0312.irrxfw

(you probably will need to do chmod +x IRReceiverUpdaterTool2)
5) run the firmware patch: ./IRReceiverUpdaterTool2 irrxfw-0x0312.irrxfw

6) if the process worked you should see this message near the end of the output:

Flash Image Verification Succeeded…
SendCmdExitBootLoader
Bootload Success…

At his point the IR indicator blinks yellow. The Apple UI is reacting again. With
an ATV software Version 3.0.2 on a Geforce Go 7300 1GHz ATV the IR became
inoperable after a reboot.

Redoing the update, then unpairing the remote and pairing it again fixed this.

On a side note: I found this blog post 20 minutes after I made it when googling for ‘IRReceiverUpdaterTool2’.

Google is simply amazing.

apple and flash

Apple technology

Apple published a “Thoughts on Flash”. The piece is amazingly well crafted and written. The real reason for Apples bold move attempting to keep flash out of the mobile space only shines through. If Flash would become the engine for mobile, then applications could run on Apple and other devices. A mobile software eco system would grow outside of the Apple space.

Apple realizes the potential of preventing this. Out of the box the iPad can NOT do any of the following:

= perform as a calculator
= perform as an alarm clock
= read PDFs

Yes, I am sure, ‘there is an app for that’. Which is the model of the device. And in order to create software for this you have to adhere to Apples programming standards (objective C) and use their distribution channels. They are in control. Letting flash grow in this space would not allow them to control this.

For Apple this makes perfect sense. And it is amazing that they had vision that they would be able to dethrone a system that always could claim greater than ninety percent proliferation.

nice image

history

It would be tricky to sell this image as a comp.
It would also have been tricky to suggest a couple of weeks ago that Europe could experience a flight outage of 9/11 dimensions.

avalanche on mars

technology

Some rocks fall down on the north pole of Mars, and we have a picture of it.

Nature happens even if nobody watches. Doing it for the first time is sometimes all it takes to make me re-realize that.

glowing rectangle

daily life history technology

Are we in trouble when the Onion has a point?

looking up memory chips

linux technology

If a machine sports edac then


find /sys/devices/system/edac/ \( -name mem_type -o -name size_mb -o -name mc_name \) -exec cat {} \;

will display quickly what kind of memory modules are visible to the kernel, and in which state they are in.