Marko Karppinen had no problems with .mac until a different Marko asked Apple for the account password… and Apple gave it to them.

Apple’s since apologized and I’m sure this is not an everyday occurence. Strikes me as funny timing, that on the eve of the “me.com” rollout, Marko’s account is suddenly at somebodyelse.com.

Wil Shipley posted a great article on handling a really really nasty bug reported by a customer. Under an extremely heavy, spiking support load, a customer reports an extreme case which reliably locks up his machine.

One of the nastiest bugs I had to deal with was when working on OS/2. During OS/2 Warp’s development, the window manager and related code had to be ported from a 16-bit mixed assembly & C source base to 32-bit pure C. A friend had done most of the conversion of the kernel-level mouse code, which is responsible for actually moving your pointer around on the screen and telling the application world about mouse movement. If memory serves, I finished up that conversion. Somehow there was a tiny error where if you left the mouse in the correct position (on one of every 8th row or something) then moved it up at just the right velocity, your mouse would go forever haywire.

It was common enough that everyone would hit this after a few minutes. But uncommon enough to be really hard to reproduce, even if somehow you knew how to reproduce it. The entire OS/2 development group was suffering from this nasty bug and it was up to me to figure out what was going wrong. At that time debugging was limited to stepping through assembly, no matter what high-level language your code was written in. And debugging a kernel mode mouse driver? Forget breakpoints. It took about two days of staring at the code, dreaming up all the possible code paths before I found the tiny logic hole responsible.

Some iPhone applications starting to show up. Here’s one you may not have run across yet: TouchTomes. Their first book/game is called “Battle of Waterloo” and it’s aimed at kids aged 9-12: it’s in the same genre as the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. I used to love that kind of book.

So you have a Mac at home… but you’re out and about, with another Mac. Maybe you’re at work and you want to dial home.How do you do that? And how do you do it securely?

» Continue reading “Screen Sharing to your Mac at home”

Had a chat with Henry Melton the other day about writing and Mac things. He has written several books and two are available on Amazon, with excellent reviews. Worth checking out!

Our 4-year old AC unit broke – the condenser needs replacing. It’s a Lennox, and still under warranty. Or so we thought. » Continue reading “Lennox Air Conditioning and their broken warranties”

Blimey. Beautiful new coins for the UK.

I love that the £1 coin brings the set together.

(In the video on The Royal Mint’s site, you can see the designer, Matthew Dent,using a Mac.)

My favorite notes are possibly the Australian ones. They use polymer rather than paper. Polymer lasts longer and can still be recycled. Also, note designs can include transparency.

In contrast, the US’ Department of the Treasury’s newly introduced $5 bill features a large purple “5″. Clearly designed by committee and passed by the Department of Mediocrity, this feature is unlikely to make the history books.

The new $5 has lots of security features. So many that, while two security features are explained under the Security heading, another hides under Design Features and two more under Other Features. Is the Barney-colored “5″ so much better for someone with visual impairment than, say, making bills different sizes (like other countries do)? Different sizes mean that even blind people can tell notes apart… surely better than gaudiness?

And what is destined for the $50 note? The same large font will result in “50″ taking up about a sixth of the note! What about $100…? Perhaps the Treasury could announce an open competition like The Royal Mint did? America’s notes could use a fresh take on the design.

Hats off to the UK for producing such a lovely coin design!

Reasons TO develop for the iPhone:

1. Potentially huge market.
2. Apple handles all the sales and marketing. They’re good at that.
3. Turn your Cocoa skills, currently maxed out at 5% of the market, onto the soon-to-be-larger iPhone and iPod Touch markets. $$$!
4. FUN!

Reasons not to develop for the iPhone:

1. 100,000 SDK downloads already, plus more torrented and copied. Even if not all of them produce something, it means there are 100 other people writing exactly the same application as you. Yours had better be something very special to stand out from the crowd.
2. In my case, it’s a good thing Apple will do the marketing: I’d have a hard time marketing myself if I were the last man on Earth. It’s been said Apple likes to control the whole chain of their business, because when you’re reliant on someone else, you get burnt. And Apple has your business by the balls. They control access to the most important aspect of your business – your customers. Apple doesn’t like you or your app? You’re gone from the Store, with no other means of distribution.

Those start-ups getting VC money to do iPhone development? The VCs don’t own those companies. Apple owns every one of them. Utterly pwned.

iTunes, I have to admit, is pretty neat. So’s this recent song from Adele, “Hometown Glory“. Quite the voice.

Now much of TimeFlyer was written while Muse’s Absolution album was playing, in particular, “Butterflies and Hurricanes“.

My turn for prediction. There will be no DVD drive in the upcoming (I hope!) MBP revision. As with the Air, Apple has a technology replacing every use of DVDs. You think that external DVD drive Apple makes is just for the Air? No way.

Now if you removed the DVD drive, what might the resulting MBP look like? Wedge shape, like the Air. But thicker than an Air, to retain ExpressCard and other I/O. Big-ass touch pad, like the Air. But also with a touch-enabled mouse button so Bootcamp users can finally have two proper mouse buttons.

Or heck, use the space for some liquid cooling and throw a G5 in there, just to say, “There! We did it!”

OK perhaps not.

And please, now that nVidia’s CUDA GPU programming technology is on the Mac, let the MPB continue to have a CUDA-compatible graphics chip.

Really really high resolution displays? Wait for WWDC for that one.