Weblog of a “Switcher”

Wow, what an amazing turn of events:

Today, we announced a non-exclusive advertising agreement that will provide Yahoo! with access to our AdSense for search and AdSense for content advertising programs on their U.S. and Canadian web properties. In addition, we will work to enable interoperability between our respective instant messaging services allowing users better, broader communication online.

[From Official Google Blog: Our agreement to provide ad technology to Yahoo!]

Two competitors working together! I wonder if this is to help Yahoo! fight off Microsoft from taking over.

Still, It's a very impressive move by Google. If there are no ulterior motives, this would probably be the biggest PR move any company has ever done before. It's going to make Google look like saints!

Anyone have any thoughts on why this is happening? It sure looks like a good will gesture to me.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: Google, Microsoft, Yahoo

Lately, I've been reading about all these people selling their existing iPhones with the understanding that Apple is going to announce new 3G iPhones on Monday.

I would get the biggest laugh if Apple instead did not announce a new iPhone on Monday. There has been tons of speculation and rumors of a new 3G iPhone.

Now, I realize that in all likelihood, Apple will announce new iPhones. Why? Because you can't buy an iPhone now to save your life. There are very few stores that have iPhones in stock. Why is this? Everyones guess is that Apple is holding it's stock so that when they announce the new iPhones on Monday, they will ship those phones as well as the original iPhones to stores.

What makes me wonder though is why hold back the stock of the current generation of iPhones? I mean if they are going to have both 3G and GSM iPhones, why hold back the stock?

The only thing I can figure is that all the "sneak peak" pictures are real and they are redesigning the device. So the 2nd Gen iPhones will look different than the 1st Gen iPhones.

Ah well, It would be a pretty funny practical joke to play on iPhone owners who are selling their phones in anticipation of a new iPhone.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: Apple, Wwdc

I was watching GeekBrief.tv this morning and Cali told us that a new study claims that PlayStation 3's and HDTV's take up more energy than a refrigerator over the course of a year. There was an article that she linked to that I am linking to as well:

Power bills soaring? Turn off the Playstation: study | Technology | Reuters
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Don't blame the fridge for your steep power bills -- an Australian consumer agency study has found that videogame consoles and plasma flat-screen TVs are major electricity guzzlers, even when left on stand-by.

This article is utter BullShit! (Sorry for the language, but it's how I feel) I wrote about this once before, so I'll let you read that article in response to this: Absurd ad I saw on television.

I just felt that this needed to be said again. Don't let these BS studies make you start turning off your electronics all the way. There is no need. Electronics in standby mode use very little energy and will cause more grief than good in the long run.

Think of it like turning your alarm clock off every morning after you wake up. When you get ready for bed that night, you will have to reset the clock and the alarm just to save a few watts.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: energy, gadget, hdtv, standby

Backup your computer! Seriously. At least, backup your data files. Why write a post about something so obvious with such a strange headline? Let me explain...

Basically, I wiped out my Mac Pro's boot drive with the OS and all my data files including media I purchased from Apple in iTunes. Did I backup the drive or data before doing this incredibly stupid act? No. Why? I wanted to install Windows using Boot Camp. I'll explain that part soon.

So why didn't I backup the drive before attempting to install Windows? I didn't have the space to backup all that data. Even though I had just the day prior ordered a 1TB external Hard Drive for just such purposes which will be arriving Monday. Your probably asking why didn't I just wait until the drive came and I had backed up my system before doing this? A total lack of patients.

OK, here's the scoop on my stupidity. I have 3 HDD's in my Mac Pro. 1 750GB and 2 500GB drives. The 750GB drive is where I store things like movies, source code and other larger data files. Why I didn't store my music on this drive is a mystery to me, but I didn't. One of the 500GB drives is the original drive that came with the Mac Pro and had the OS my home folder, music, etc... The other 500GB drive came out of an older 1TB external HDD from Maxtor that died because the fan in the box stopped spinning and overheated the drives. One of the two drives in in this thing from Maxtor seems to be OK and the other drive is toast. So, I thought I would put Windows on the possibly good drive since if it wasn't, I wouldn't lose any sleep over it dying.

So, I got out my Windows XP Pro SP2 CD and started the process of installing Windows with Boot Camp. I selected the drive to put Windows on and the machine rebooted with the Windows CD and the Windows setup started. I got to the point in the setup where it asks which drive/partition I want to put Windows on. This is where the problem was. All three drives were listed in the screen as the same physical drive location.

I had to resort to looking at what was on the drives in order to determine which drive to select. The 750GB drive was easy enough to spot, but the two 500GB drives were not so easy. One had 2 partitions and the other had 1. This seemed odd to me since neither drive should have had more than one partition.

So I stopped the setup, rebooted back into OS X and started Disk Utility. I went into the drive I wanted to install Windows on and set it to have 3 partitions of equal size. I figured, I would be able to tell which was which then, and would be able to start. I restarted Boot Camp, and found myself in the same location when I was presented with the exact same list. Now this is strange since the drive to have Windows on it was setup to have 3 partitions.

This is where I should have simply stopped and waited until Tuesday after getting my backup drive and had fully backed up my system. Nope, I didn't though, and I selected the drive with 1 partition. I made this decision because I was guessing that Boot Camp was wiping out any partitions I had setup when I selected the drive to be a Windows drive. There are 3 options in that Dialog, one is to use a specific partition, the second is to use the entire drive and the third I can't remember now.

I was assuming (remember was assuming does? Makes an ASS out of U and ME.) that Boot Camp was wiping out the 3 partitions and making one for the process of installing Windows on it and that the drive with 2 partitions was something that OS X had done when installing Leopard on it.

I formatted the drive and put NTFS on it and installed Windows on the drive. This took quite some time since the format had to use the slow method. I wonder if that was a clue too. As soon as I started the format, I felt like I was making a mistake. However, by this point, it was way too late.

So now I was ready to setup Parallels to see the newly created Windows install. I rebooted and held the option key to switch back to OS X. When the system came up to the drive selection prompt, all I saw was the Windows drive. At this point, I knew I was in for a looooong weekend.

I have been recovering ever since. All my software registration is stored in both Mail.app (which is gone now) and Gmail (thank goodness!) so I at least have all my registration codes.

I don't have all the data I have collected over the course of almost two years and in some cases more like 10 years. I was able to pull most of my music off my iPod thanks to a program called Senuti (iTunes spelled backwards) since all iTunes does is pull purchased (non iTunes-Plus tracks) from the iPod. I have to write to Apple and beg them to let me redownload the rest of my purchases since I didn't have any video files on it.

All my documents are gone, pictures I have collected over quite some time, data from programs I have been collecting, icons I have been collecting in CandyBar (I had over 20,000), on and on and on...

All because I wasn't patient enough to wait a few days. I'm still kicking myself for this. I keep remembering things that I don't have anymore because I was so stupid.

Lesson learned

Backup your computer! No matter what the reason, your data is not safe unless you back it up. Time Machine is really a great way to do this. Sure you won't be able to boot the Time Machine backup drive to aid in recovering your lost data like you would if you used a program like SuperDuper! You need backup data that contains more than one version of your files. Why? Corrupt files.

I remember reading about someone who lost their iTunes data (not the music, just their ratings and other meta data. Why, because the file that stored that data had somehow become corrupted. Backing up your data with a program like SuperDuper! would protect you only if you discovered the corruption before the next backup started. If a second, say daily, backup was performed, the corrupted file would be backed up and your data would still be lost even with a backup!

Incremental backups like those done with Time Machine will allow you to pull a file that is clean even if incremental backups occur after the corruption. You simply have to find the file before it was corrupted. Easy to do with something like Time Machine.

I have looked all over for other backup programs that would perform incremental backups, but have not found any other programs. Retrospect for the Mac does support incremental backups, but I just don't like the program. Especially now that I have tasted Time Machine. If that Maxtor drive hadn't died, I would still have a backup I could have used to restore my mistake.

Small side benefit

At least I now have a chance to clean up my system. I had way too many programs installed and this gives me the chance to clean that up. I just wish I hadn't lost all my data. Ah well, back to the recovery process...

written by Dave M. \\ tags: backup, stupidity

Sounds absurd right? You would think so, but a Vancouver paper is claiming that if a student had not been listening to his iPod on the way to pick up his mail, he would still be living and breathing today.

Now, I'm all for making sure that you don't play music to loud when listening with in-ear headphones or earbuds, but seriously, so say that due to the volume of his iPod, he had no idea that a helicopter was about to crash on him is really pushing it.

globeandmail.com: Death spurs headphone debate:
VANCOUVER -- The death of a pedestrian in Cranbrook, B.C., on Tuesday has raised the question of how loud is too loud when it comes to listening to iPods and other personal music players.

Isaiah Otieno, a 23-year-old student, was killed when he was struck and dragged by a helicopter that crashed to the ground as he was walking to the mailbox.

Eyewitnesses reported that Mr. Otieno seemed completely unaware that he was in danger and a friend told reporters that he often listened to music through earbuds (in-ear headphones) with the hood of his sweatshirt pulled up over his head.

By the way, the above story goes on for quite a few more paragraphs, but this is the only part of the story that talks specifically about the helicopter crash and iPods.

I'm surprised that they are not complaining that hoodies (sweatshirts with hoods that can be cinched tight around the head) are dangerous as well. It's certainly as much to blame for this kids death as the iPod is.

Getting back to the point of this story... Yes it's important that people listening to music via headphones or earbuds should be careful to not play them too loud so they don't damage their hearing. Is it really the government's business to regulate how loud a portable media device can be played and enforce it? When are we going to stop blaming everybody and thing other than ourselves for our own stupidity?

Putting limits on the maximum volume a portable media player can be set to is really not the answer here. Have you ever tried to listen to a podcast that had not been recorded with correct level before being published? Or audiobooks for that matter. If there were limits enforced on my iPod, I would not be able to listen to those items at all. The way Apple implemented volume limiting actually is pretty darn good. A parent could set the limit so that their child can't adjust it later unless they know the code set by the parent. This puts the responsibility squarely on the parent and not Apple.

Now I suppose that if you look at this from a medical/insurance standpoint, a person who plays his portable media player too loud to the point of damaging his/her hearing will later probably be needing medical attention when they start complaining that they can't hear. Which would possibly lead to needing a hearing aid to help them hear. Which costs all insured citizens since the claim would inevitability result in rate increases.

So I suppose, to protect our insurance rates, we need some form of control from idiots that play portable media players too loud. However, there are lots of other ways humans can destroy their hearing than listening to a portable media player too loud.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: Apple, death, helicopter, iPod, media, mp3, player, portable

NBC-Vista copy-protection snafu reminds us why DRM stinks:
Handfuls of Windows Vista Media Center users found themselves blocked from making recordings of their favorite TV shows this week when a broadcast flag triggered the software's built-in copy protection measures. The flag affected users trying to record prime-time NBC shows on Monday evening, using both over-the-air broadcasts and cable. Although the problem is being 'looked into' by both NBC and Microsoft, the incident serves as another reminder that DRM gives content providers full control, even if by accident.

This is exactly the kind of thing that made me switch to Macintosh. Mind you, I don't use any of my Mac's to record television shows. In fact, the only device doing this at the moment is a Series 3 TiVo. However, if I were going to use a computer to record television, it would definitely be a Macintosh with Elgato's EyeTV systems.

I get the impression that this was a mixup and it wasn't meant to happen. I mean really, of all the shows to protect, American Gladiators? Clearly a fowl-up somewhere. However, it's a strong reminder, as Ars Technica says, that DRM is just not a good idea.

Actually, this story is more centered around DRM than it is about Microsoft Windows Vista. However since Microsoft is one of the leaders in screwing over it's customers by capitulating to the demands of IP holders like the MPAA and RIAA, it's more than related to me.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: broadcast flag, Drm, Vista, Windows

So could someone please explain to me what is so great about Hahlo3 for the iPhone and Twitter? I have been trying to use this "web app" and it drives me crazy! In fact there have been literally hundreds of Tweets talking about how great this web app is.

So let me list off all the things I don't like about Hahlo3:

1. No paging: I can only see about 20 of the latest Tweets that come my way. With m.twitter.com, I see all the Tweets I want since it has a way of paging back and forward.
   Update: I should have stated that this is not Hahlo's fault but a limitation with the Twitter API that has not been corrected. All Twitter clients will have this problem in fact. Current desktop as well as native iPhone clients.
2. Taking a look at a link in a Tweet loses the place I was at when I return. Now, this may not be a fault of Hahlo3 since even m.twitter.com needs to reload thanks to Safari on the iPhone loosing the page almost all the time when looking at a new web page. However, m.twitter.com has less Tweets on a page so I can find the one I was at before leaving.
   Update: As Dean (a representative of Hahlo) has pointed out to me in the comments, this is a limitation of Mobile Safari. Apparently if a new webpage takes up too much memory, previous web pages caches are lost to make room for the currently displayed page. This is something Apple should fix for Mobile Safari so that more than one web page can be kept in memory (within reason). It seems a bit unreasonable right now.
3. Hahlo3 has options for putting replies and your tweets inline with the friends timeline. However, the options don't currently work. Dean has straightened me out on this gripe. I misread some text under the options in Hahlo's settings to basically read that they wouldn't work if the options were turned on. In fact, they work fine. I just don't have any recent replies that would appear in the list of recent tweets and my personal tweets did, in fact, appear inline with the rest of the tweets.
4. When I discover a new Twitter user I might want to follow, I can go to their profile and follow them, but I can't adjust the Device Updates for that user.
   Update: I get the impression from Dean that this is a bug in the way I was bringing up the profile of a Twitter user I was not following. If I am correct and it is a bug, I suspect it will get corrected quickly. Apparently, if you look at a profile of someone you are following, you will see two buttons, one to stop following them and another to change the status of Device Notifications.

These are just the four top things that turn me off to the web app. There are so many other Twitter web apps out there and a couple that I like way more than Hahlo3.

I just can't understand all the positive comments being spit out to Twitter.

Now, don't get me wrong, I see all the good things about it too. Knowing how many characters are in the text fields is very important, the interface is well designed, getting around in the web app is great.

But to say that a web app is better than a soon to be written native iPhone app? No, I don't buy it, not at all.

So, honestly, what am I missing here that makes Hahlo3 so fantastic? I'm listening...

---

Update: I must say, I have received a lot of traffic from this post. I obviously hit a nerve when I posted it. This was my goal really. I really wanted to find out what was so special about Hahlo 3 and from the responses I got including one from a representative of Hahlo, Dean, I was able to clear up some of my gripes.

Plus, by looking up the info for replies to the comments, I found way more features in Hahlo3 that I even knew were there. I suggested to Dean that a webpage be setup to act as documentation for the web app so that us "slower" users (or at least myself) would have a clearer picture of what all Hahlo 3 can do.

Thank you one and all for your help. I am really beginning to see why there is such a buzz for the Hahlo 3.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: hahlo3, Twitter, web app, webapp

Grand Theft Auto IV has been released and is selling like gangbusters. So now it's time, yet again, for the news media to start attacking.

 

MyFox St. Louis | Grand Theft Auto IV - A Game Or Gateway To Crime?:

For the video game Grand Theft Auto irresponsibility is part of the programming. 

Violence, crime and mayhem fill just about every frame in every version offering a blueprint for bad behavior
...

Is it a game or a gateway to crime?

I just don't understand why the news media thinks that Video games are a way for kids to be swayed into violence and crime when there are so many movies out there that make GTA IV seem tame.

Why doesn't the news media jump all over violent movies? It's not because children can get video games easier than seeing violent movies, since a child can see a violent movie very easy and in the same way that a child can play a violent video game.

The only thing I can figure, is that the news media just don't "get" video games so they just attack them. Movies are easy to "get", you just put a DVD into your DVD player and off you go. With a video game, you actually have to figure out how to play the game and I'm guessing that these writers just don't have a clue how to play, so they assume that video games somehow brainwash their players into doing the acts that they do in the games.

I don't know, probably not, but I just don't get why the news media finds video games so easy to attack. Anyone have any ideas?

written by Dave M. \\ tags: gta, gta iv, gtaiv, media, movie, news, news media, responsibility, video game, violence

During my usual news surfing today, I cam across an article that basically questioned Apple's wisdom in choosing Objective-C for the language to use for it's iPhone SDK

"Did Apple Make A Mistake Choosing Objective-C
For iPhone SDK?" at Simon’s Blog:
DID APPLE MAKE A MISTAKE CHOOSING OBJECTIVE-C
FOR IPHONE SDK?
...
Recently, Apple bowed to the inevitable, and has released an SDK for developer testing. The language they chose to base the SDK around is Objective-C. This wasn’t a complete surprise - after all, it’s the ‘native’ language of Mac OS X. However, while it’s not a surprise, I wonder if it’s not a major strategic error on Apple’s part. The point is this: the Mac is a niche platform, and is especially niche in terms of numbers of developers building applications in Objective-C.
...

Normally I don't even bother to read such articles. This one, for some reason, caught my attention and I just had to wonder why Simon even wondered this.

Apple has had some serious success with it's OS X operating system. So much so, that when it developed it's mobile phone, the iPhone, it choose to use a stripped down version of OS X to drive it. As we have seen, this was a very good decision. The iPhone's user interface is now a standard that other mobile phone manufacturers are striving to emulate. Something that seems to happen a lot in the consumer electronics sector with products that Apple also has in that sector. The iPod and Macintosh come to mind here.

So now that they have OS X as a kernel for the iPhone, what language should they use for developing software for it? What else but the language that is used for OS X on their computers? Objective-C.

Since they choose Objective-C for the SDK a lot of library code used in OS X was able to be ported to the iPhone SDK so that Apple's developers could write applications for the iPhone very quickly. In fact, they use Xcode, Apple's free development environment, to develop applications for the iPhone. No need to create a new development environment, no need to create a new set of API calls. Everything was sitting around ready to be reused for the iPhone. Object Orientated programming at it's best.

Simon's point was that Objective-C isn't a very popular language compared to others being used for development. Now, he got his data from Tiobe Software, a company specializing in assessing and tracking the quality of software. Apparently, they index software development languages every month to see how they fair in the world of software development.

Based on this index for April 2008, Objective-C is 38. One behind BASH, a command-line shell scripting language.

Now, one thing that I have to wonder about this index is, who are they polling to get their data? Well, from what I can get from the site, it looks like they query search engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo! as well as others and apply the results of the searches through normalization formulas to get the results they publish.

So, they are basing their index on how much people talk about a language. I wonder if they include posts about how bad a language is and the multitude of questions people as on the web for help with those languages.

He goes on to say that he doesn't feel that Objective-C is a bad language, he just feels that it's not popular. I have to wonder if he would feel better if Apple used (heaven forbid...) Java.

I have been spending time recently attempting to learn how to program the Macintosh, and possibly even the iPhone. I feel pretty comfortable with Objective-C at this point. There are still a few parts I need to understand before I start tackling the Mac and it's API What I have learned about Objective-C makes me really appreciate the language choice over many other languages they could have chosen. Let me give an example...

With Java, how many times have you gone to a web page that hosts a Java Applet and found it doesn't run due to an exception of some kind? It's not your fault, but it just died. Now, imagine you are on your iPhone and see a dialog pop-up that tells you that the program you are running threw a NULLPOINTER exception. How annoyed would you be?

With Objective-C, null pointer exceptions can't happen. Null pointers can be passed around, but the language pretty much just ignores them and moves on. No exception dialog, it just moves on. Now, this can be a bad thing if that null pointer was needed to perform a critical task. We all know that iPhone apps "crash". I have had Safari crash several times on me. The difference here is that the user doesn't know why it crashes, it just went away, and a simple touch of the icon will bring it back quite quickly.

Another very annoying issue with Java is it's garbage collection. Objective-C 2.0 can do garbage collection, but Apple has decided to disable the ability to use it with the iPhone. A very wise decision. The absolutely most annoying thing about Java is having to wait for the JVM to get around to cleaning up memory. Now this means that the iPhone could have a program that leaks memory in such a way that it uses up all the memory available for program execution. One the other hand, programs on the iPhone run very fast, way faster than any other mobile phone I have seen.

So, did Apple make a mistake choosing Objective-C to develop iPhone applications with? I have to say no, and I think Simon will see that I'm not the only one that feels that way when June comes and the iPhone Application store opens to show hundreds if not thousands of applications ready to download to iPhones.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: Apple, iPhone, objective-c, Sdk

Well, it appears that PayPal made a clarification to it's statement about blocking browsers that access PayPal.

AppleInsider | PayPal clarifies:
PayPal: No plans to block Safari

A representative for PayPal on Friday said the ecommerce firm is developing features to block customers from logging into PayPal when using obsolete browsers on outdated or unsupported operating systems, but has no intention of blocking Safari as a company white paper seemed to imply.

'An example of such a browser/OS combination might be, for example, Internet Explorer 4 running on Windows 98,' said spokesperson Michael Oldenburg. 'In doing so, we better protect our customers from viewing a phishing site through their browser. We have absolutely no intention of blocking current versions of any browsers, including Apple’s Safari, from our website.'

The Unofficial Apple Weblog | PayPal says it won't block Safari:
There's been some talk about PayPal blocking Safari from using its services, and I'm among those concerned about it... even if only from a convenience standpoint. Originally the news was gleaned from statements by PayPal Chief Information Security Officer Michael Barrett regarding browsers without phishing protection -- which most assumed included our beloved Webkit-based compass. But in a brief addendum to a post at the Wall Street Journal last week it was reported that -- while Paypal will be blocking older browsers (IE4-era) and older operating systems -- Safari is safe from the cut.

This is good to hear. This makes me believe that Apple's Safari browser is actually safe to use with PayPal. Otherwise they would insist that Apple do something to shore up it's holes.

As A PayPal user and Safari user myself, I feel better knowing that PayPal considers Safari a safe browser to use with it's service.

I just hope that the decision to not include Safari in the list of browsers being blocked wasn't due to pressure from either the media or Apple.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: anti-phishing, Apple, paypal, Safari