Blog::new

This morning I noticed that some comments from my blog had disappeared. Checking the DB table, they’re gone for good (my host currently has no automated DB backup facility for my kind of account). I only have a precious few to start with, so I made the effort to dig them up (thank you Google for your ‘cache:’ operator) and re-create them. I wish I knew what happened, I suspect akismet since I think it happened after a round of spam moderation. Anyway, that’s one more reason to look into an alternative hosting solution. DB backup through phpMyAdmin is no fun.

(Edit : turns out that my host does make automated, daily DB backups, lucky for me I came across them when looking for my website logs – so I was finally able to properly restore de comments table)

Looks like my intuition on how the iphone/ipod touch would become a perfect universal remote is becoming real.

So Canon has just announced the 50D (wish they had announced a 6D instead). Pretty interesting upgrade, in my case it’s mainly the Auto-ISO mode being able to go from 100 to 1600 (rather than 400-800 as in the 40D) which might be worth the upgrade (that, and the fact that upgrading to every other release makes it very hard to sell your old camera). One thing dpreview.com’s extensive preview  notes is that the ‘direct print’ button now has an actual useful usage as it gives access to the live view. They can’t understand the purpose of such a button on a ‘prosumer’ camera, and neither could I until I read this article. In short, it explains that Japan passed on the wave of 8-bits machines because they simply were not able to handle their alphabet. Therefore, instead of PCs, Japan mostly developed appliances. Machines which were pretty much stand-alone and could do one main thing and many other related things. Like taking photos, and printing them. Therefore I figure that the Canon’s “direct print” button could be a remnant of this “appliance culture”. At least that’s the only sane explanation I can think of.

Answer : Turn off 3G.

After the first few days of using my iphone 3G, I was rather disappointed to see that the battery would hardly last through a couple of days (with usage limited to a phone call or two, and listening to podcasts). This was a clear regression from my first iphone. Well, it seems that you can revert back to having the same battery life by turning off 3G in the settings (which is annoying but tolerable, given that I rarely access the Net from the outside, in which case I can turn it back on).

[EDIT: Firmware upgrade to 2.1 does indeed solve this problem ]

Two days ago, my office mate received his Openmoko-based mobile phone. First thing he told me about it was that is wasn’t quite ready for the general public : “yeah, you need to run the ‘date’ command from the console to set its internal clock”. At first, all you have is the ability to make and receive phone calls and… a console. And apparently that’s about it. After about an hour he said “ok, it’s finally connected to the guest WiFi, I can ssh to it now”. At the same time, by some strange coincidence, I came across this blog post linked from the Linux Hater’s Blog (which I wholeheartedly recommend – so far I’ve yet to find a single article which I couldn’t link to my own experience with Linux). I read the first few lines of the post to my office mate and he agreed : “yeah, I figure it will take me about a week to set it up completely”.

When Time Machine appeared on OS X, it was met with a collective shrug among the Linux community : “It’s just a good-looking backup system, anyone can do the same with a cron/bash/rsync”. This is wrong and here’s why, in pictures.

When you activate Time Machine from the Finder, you get this :

But here’s what you get when you activate Time Machine from Mail :

Yes, you stay in Mail. You do the lookup within Mail. You don’t have to drop into Mail’s guts and how it stores messages to restore one. The backup system is fully integrated in the applications it backs up. 

Same from the Address Book :

Unfortunately it doesn’t work like this for all Apple applications yet (for instance ical or iphoto don’t support this at the moment, which is too bad since they’d be good candidates). Nevertheless, you can see that the intent goes way beyond providing a backup system with a fancy UI. The level of integration in the OS is unprecedented. Good luck ever implementing that on Linux.

Right now the only serious competition the iPhone has is Google’s android platform. As with desktop OSes, what makes the winner is the available applications. Well, while the echoes from the iphone developers are, shall we say, rather positive, it seems the Android folks are having some tough time. Now let’s see, “Software providers finding it difficult to develop programs on a platform still going through revisions”, “Handset (i.e. hardware) manufacturers having a tough time integrating that software into their devices”… now where have I seen something like this already ?

So here’s a cheap prediction : android and the iphone will replicate the same pattern as linux and os/x, for the exact same reasons : unfocused bazaar community on one side, singled-minded well organised one on the other. Yes, android will likely go into a myriad of unexpected directions, appearing richer than the iphone.  But it will never be able to achieve the same level of quality as the iphone, and will be just as confusing an offer as Linux.

Two things I’ve come to realize after leaving the Linux community :

• it’s actually very small
• if you left out of disillusion, you’re not alone

The guy’s spot-on almost every time. In particular, his rants on how to write a Gnome app and its obligatory counterpart, how to write a KDE app, are real gems.

By now you’ve probably already seen this leaked video from Microsoft, apparently an internal “motivating” video from the Vista sales department, about SP1.

Microsoft claims it’s actually a spoof, but I have a hard time believing it. I’ve seen my share of sales droids making complete fool of themselves in trying to be “cool”, embarrassing their audience to the point of physical discomfort. And for a spoof to be this long and so dull, it’s just not convincing at all.

At least when geeks behave in a ridiculous fashion, like when they go to a Sci-Fi convention wearing appalling costumes, they have the excuse of being out of touch with reality. That’s part of the definition. But sales people ? These ones are supposed to be very much in the real world, aren’t they ?

May be not so after all .