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.

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.

First we need to be able to SSH to your home machine. SSH is a secure network protocol. Then we’ll run Screen Sharing over that secure connection.

Get yourself a DNS name from dyndns.org. It’s free. Let’s say you end up with myhomemac.homeip.net. So now you know the internet address of your home router… you need to get through that to your Mac.

We’re going to be using SSH – very secure. It runs on port 22, and your router needs to know that any connection on port 22 should be made to your Mac. Every router has a different way to configure this.

To do that in Airport Utility, go to the Internet tab, then click DHCP; then add a DHCP Reservation. Next go to the Advanced area and click Port Mapping. Add an entry for “Remote Login – SSH”. Ignore the UDP fields but enter the DHCP IP address you set up in the Private IP Address field.

On the Mac you want to tunnel to, ensure both SSH and Screen Sharing are enabled by going to System Preferences, Sharing, and then checking the Remote Login and Screen Sharing boxes.
That’s all the home work done.

Now when you’re at work, create an SSH tunnel to carry the screen sharing traffic. You need to do this from Terminal:

ssh -N -L 59001:127.0.0.1:5900 myhomemac.homeip.net

Switch in the network address you got from dyndns, of course. This basically connects your local port 59001 to the remote port 5900, which is the port used by Screen Sharing.

The Screen Sharing program doesn’t show up in Spotlight. Argh. Using Finder browse to /System/CoreServices, and Screen Sharing is in there. Then from the menu bar choose Connection->New, and enter:

vnc://127.0.0.1:59001

This tells Screen Sharing to look at your local machine’s port 59001, which SSH has tunneled to the remote Mac’s port 5900, which is the port that your screen is shared on.

You have secure remote screen sharing! Ensure your Mac’s password is strong, as it’s now open for SSH access and it will get hack attempts.

Unfortunately, Lennox’s warranty program is completely ass-backwards. They actually require you to pay for the replacement! “Yes sir, that part is under warranty, you just have to pay us for it.” Hello, Lennox, that’s not a warranty. Admittedly, they will refund you the money on some unspecified future date. That’s no warranty – that’s a returns policy. You get to buy a second unit and they refund you for the original. Can you imagine Wal-Mart acting like that? “Oh, your TV didn’t work when you got it home? Well, just buy another and we’ll mail you a check for the broken one.”

Our AC repairman can’t afford to front the money. I can’t blame him. He shouldn’t have to.

Meanwhile we have three young children who can’t get to sleep because their bedrooms are 80+ degrees at night.

What are we supposed to do?

Lennox, how about re-thinking your inane warranty policy into something more customer-friendly?

Update: our repairman stepped up and paid for the new part from Lennox. I hope they reimburse him promptly. Thank, Mark!

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!

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.

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

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.