Fake Rob (“and you can quote me on that”) Enderle and Fake John Dvorak make special guest appearances on the Single Pixel blog today. Fake Rob has a revelation concerning the iPhone’s origins, and Fake John makes his big prediction for 2008. Over to you, Rob:

FRE: Thanks, Graham. I have some amazing news about how the iPhone came to be. After some serious thinking, I have discovered the group inside Apple in which the iPhone originated. Think about it – which existing Apple device most closely resembles the iPhone in both size and weight? That’s right, the Apple Mouse. It makes perfect sense – the one button and everything! Last year even Apple abandoned the single button mouse, and the mouse group, fearing for their very existence, produced the first prototype of what would become the iPhone. They squashed the mouse flat, added some clear plastic left over from an old iMac, turned the laser tracking device upside down and – copying Microsoft’s breakthrough Surface here – used the infra-red laser to track the user’s touch. The same crazy designer who insisted on one button mice is now in charge of iPhone hardware design!

FJD: That’s amazing, Rob. Apple’s making the same mistake again – the one button mouse was never a success and it won’t work for phones either! People often scoff at me for saying that people weren’t interested in mice. I was right – until they added a second button! That’s when the mouse took off – everyone wants a second button. Consumers know a monopoly when they see one, and having only one button is hugely off-putting to those who demand choice. Someone (I doubt it will be Apple) will make a 2-button phone and it will sell in droves. That’s my prediction for 2008 – a two-button phone eclipsing the iPhone, and spawning a new era in phone usability.

FRE: After figuring out how the iPhone hardware came to be, I next had to figure out the software. There used to be a video on YouTube showing the iPhone UI running on Windows Mobile. That video has been removed due to a copyright claim by Apple Inc. Why? Because, like nearly all mice, that’s the answer – the iPhone actually runs Windows Mobile!

FJD: Holy xxx!

FRE: Yes! Why else do you think there is no iPhone SDK? Because Apple is still rewriting the iPhone software to run on Mac OS X! And that’s why we don’t see key Mac software on the iPhone. It’s all Windows based – why else did Apple have to release iTunes for Windows?

FJD: That explains so much! Quicktime, Safari, and I bet all the iPhone components, they all run on Windows!

FRE: I’m starting to think that the whole NeXT purchase was just subterfuge, a ruse to distract us from what really happened. That Apple, in 1995, did actually license the NT code as rumored and THAT is what runs OS X after all. My prediction for 2008 is that Microsoft, badly burned by Vista, will approach Apple and attempt to license back Apple’s branch of the NT code – the very same code that runs Leopard. And you can quote me on that!

Apparently this affects QuickBooks 2006 and 2007 – I’m using the NUE which comes with MBPs and it too is affected.

QB tells you it has an update: running the update gives you an out-of-disk-space error. Following that you find that your Desktop folder has been replaced with an empty file called “Desktop”. Everything you had on your desktop is GONE.

OUCH!

http://www.quickbooksgroup.com/webx/forums/mac/1917

In my case, I can say thank goodness for Time Machine. A lot of users are rightfully mad. What a fiasco.

Intuit say the issue is now fixed and it’s safe to run QuickBooks again… do you trust them?

I upgraded my SVN server to Leopard. While I could ssh to the machine without error, trying SVN resulted in an odd error:

ssh_askpass: exec(/usr/libexec/ssh-askpass): No such file or directory

Online, I found several people with the same error but no solution. Mine’s working now. I had an old version of Subversion in /usr/local (Leopard ships with svn in /usr/bin) – I’d already removed svn* from /usr/local, but was getting the error. I continued to remove items from /usr/local – anything to do with apr-config, apu-config, and neon. No idea what they are; I suppose they got installed with svn 1.3. Now Leopard’s svn works.