Brain Drippings

OK, the rumor mill on the upcoming (for 5 years now) Apple Tablet device is kicking into high gear. High-enough gear that it’s becoming more and more likely that people are right and a tablet-like device is finally coming from Apple. (continue reading…)

I’ve been using pureFTPd on my Mac at least since OS X 10.4. I chose it primarily for two reasons. First, it has a large following, is actively developed, and is free; second, PureFTPd Manager was a very nice GUI for OS X that allowed you to very easily setup your server with a lot of options, manage it, and even watch it.
Unfortunately, this GUI no longer works with 10.6. At all.

Well, I thought, I can do this manually. And I could, but it was a long and sometimes hairy trip which took many wrong turns before leaving me at a working configuration.

Warning: there is a lot of bare-bones command-line compiling and Unix below. If the terminal shell scares you, stop reading now.
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Mr Kissell’s Take Control of Passwords is the latest in the Take Control series, and it is a well written and well researched ebook that is going to give you a lot of information that you need, even if you’re not sure you need it; a lot of very good advice; and a coupon for a discount on 1Password. The coupon is worth almost the entire price of the book, so go buy it and read it. You’ll educate yourself and get a price-break on an excellent software product in the bargain.

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I’ve been using Safari off and on since it first came out in parallel or in place of Firefox. I used it exclusively for quite some time because Firefox did not support the OS X keychain, but now I have 1Password, so that is not an issue.

Well, the 4.0 version of Safari has finally been released and it features a lot of improvements. In fact, with the addition of Glims and Adblock and ClicktoFlash it is a worthy replacement for Firefox in nearly every regard. However, there is one thing that I really hate in Safari, and that is how it handles typing in the address field. (continue reading…)

As summer is fast approaching we find ourselves with a  lot of ‘download this, fill it in, and fax it to us’ forms to fill out. Permission forms, waivers of liability, membership forms, &c. the usual detritus of scheduling activities for the kids over the long break. The trouble is, almost all of these are PDFs that are not setup as PDF forms, so we have to physically print them and physically fill them out, and physically put them in a fax machine (19th Century technology still hanging on by a thread in the 21st Century!), and send them off.

Or do we?  I have a computer, and I’m not afraid to use it.  Here’s what I do.

First off, I open up Pages (but this will work in Open Office or maybe even Microsoft Office) and I drag in the PDF ‘form’ in, essentially making it a background image to my page. I set it to 100% size and I make it fit the page. Then, I create text boxes for each field. I have to turn off wrap-around (“Object causes wrap” in the Pages inspector), but that’s about it.  I position each field right where it needs to go, and then I print the form to a PDF, all filled out.  I even have a screen capture of my signature saved on my computer (stored on an encrpted disk image) that I can put in, so no paper ever needs be involved. I can then fax the form, or if I whine enough, I can usually get a email address to send the form in via email. No muss, no fuss, no phonelines, no paper. As an added bonus, I have a copy of the permission form or application on my computer and I can go back to it anytime I need to (like last summer when one day-camp lost the liability waiver and idn’t tell me until I was dropping the kid off. I begged a couple of minute son the computer and printed it off right there).

On the other hand, I could just learn to write legibly, but that doesn’t seem very likely.

The top Sci-Fi Television Series of all time
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I read, with some interest, Chris Parillo’s post (mostly a repost of rules for IRC from “Mikee”) and felt I needed to comment.
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Not only is Sarah Palin refusing to answer questions about TrooperGate (or about anything at all, really), but now the GOP in AK is fully mobilized in covering up the TrooperGate scandal.

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/09/ak_lawmaker_on_troopergate_i_d.php

Keep in mind that it is far easier to complain than criticize, so even though I have some complaints here, overall I am thrilled with Leopard and do not, for a second, regret upgrading to it on the 25th (Yes, I got mine a day early).

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Mac OS 10.5, codename Leoaprd, has finally shipped. Apple delayed the release for 6 months because of the impending release of the iPhone back in June, so we’ve all been waiting a little longer than usual
for this release.

The question is, is the new release worth it? (continue reading…)

Well, finally the iTunes/Beatles deal looks like it will finally come to pass on 05-09-2007, at Apple’s upcoming special event titled, “The beat goes on”. (continue reading…)

Mike Cane posts about a rumored new Widescreen iPod. A Yellow Submarine Themed Widescreen iPod that comes with the entire Beatles catalog from the ITMS. What you say, there’s no Beatles song on the ITMS? Well, stay tuned, because rumor has it within a month, there will be.

Oh yeah, I am all over that.

[ 21-Feb-07: OK, no developments as of yet, but the rumor mill continues to churn. Stay Tuned ]

Apple, as you no doubt heard, introduced their long-rumored iPhone yesterday at MacWorld. I won’t bore you with the details, just click the links if you need more info, but a few things stand out.

First of all, the iPhone has no keypad. There is one single button named “Home” that takes you back to the initial screen. The entire UI is integrated into a high resolution 3.5″ touch screen. Interaction with the iphone is simply a matter of touching the screen, and there are even multi-touch features where you can, for example, shrink and grow displayed information by squeezing two fingers together or spreading the fingers apart. The days of T9 or multitap text input are over as the iPhone will pop up a keyboard on the screen when you need to type text.

This, alone, is a stunning feature that would be worthy of a major announcement, but as is usual with Apple, this is just the beginning. A accelerometer is included, so the iPhone knows when you turn it sideways (landscape mode) and will dynamically change the display when you do so. there is a proximity sensor, so when you hold the phone up to your ear it disables the speaker phone, turns off the display, and disables the touch-screen. There’s even an ambient light sensor that controls the brightness of the display. The bluetooth headset (about the size of the cap off a ball-point pen) turns itself off and on automatically when needed, and the phone itself switches from mobile phone to Wifi internet access dynamically.

But back to this touch screen, Apple has really done something remarkable here as they have, in one short hour, completely redesigned the mobile phone. Say what you will, no future mobile will be free of the effects of yesterday’s announcement. How long will it take before other mobile phone companies are going to try and create copies of this phone? Not long, but fortunately it looks like Apple has a firm hold on a couple hundred patents, so clones will not be possible.
The iPhone is also an iPod nano, with the familiar iPod features one would expect, including a standard dock connector. It also has come features you might not expect, turn the iPhone sideways when you’re in iPod mode, for example, and the disaply changes to a CoverFlow display, showing all your album artworks. The Coverflow on the iPhone is actually better than even in iTunes, as it allows you to select tracks directly from the covers.

But that’s all just frosting. The real advance is in the basic ‘phone’ portion of the iPhone, and those advances are quite simply stunning. The iPhone has been rumored for years, but no one ever dared expect so much. It has every feature you could want in a high-end phone (GMS+EDGE, Quad band, BlueTooth, Wifi, email, etc) but it has it all in a gorgeous package that doesn’t take a CIS degree to figure out. With typical Apple aplomb the thing just does what it should do and, since it is not tied to buttons, it shows you exactly what you need to see on any screen you happen to be on.

The phone will not be available until June as it needs to be submitted to the FCC for certification, and will be out in the Fall in Europe. I will be interested to see how it is marketed in Europe and how much it costs. The US version is a Cingular exclusive, so T-Mobile customers are left out. The other US carriers are not GSM, so they couldn’t use the phone anyway. In Europe, however, mobiles are not sold locked to a single provider like they are in the US. If the price is right, I forsee a lot of t-mobile customers int eh US getting grey-market imports from Europe. I also forsee a lot of T-Mobile customers jumping ship. This is, hands down, the best mobile phone ever, and it’s only going to get better.

Oh, and the “one more thing”? It runs on OS X.

APPL is up about $10 since the start of the Keynote, and is still rising (up over $2 in after-hours trading)

Macwork has a great tip for iPhoto users. Yeah, it’s old, so what?

Well, it looks like Mac OS X 10.5 might come with the option of using Sun Microsystem’s zettabyte files system (ZFS), which has some very interesting advantages over other file systems.

WorldOfApple.com has the details

For the record, a zettabyte is 1024⁷ bytes, or 1.18059162 × 10²¹

That is 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 bytes. The maximum size of a zfs drive is actually less than a zettabyte, as it can reference “only” 16 exabytes (1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes or about 1.15 x10¹⁸)

There’s a great blog posting about ZFS by Jeff Bonwick, who is the primary developer at Sun behind ZFS. The title of the posting is the rather amusing, “128-bit storage: are you high?”

As for why the filesystem is named ZFS when its maximal size is a mere 16 exabytes (well short of a zettabyte), Jeff explains in another posting that “Zettabyte File System” is a backronym and that he had to hunt around for something for the Z to stand for. He settled on zetta, the prefix for 10²¹.