From the desk of

I wrote a thing.

  • Steve Jobs for President (or: Apple Engineering for politics)

    I admit it: I’ve star­ted rea­ding A Regu­lar Guy by Mona Simpson which starts out by the main cha­rac­ter deci­ding he would like to run for office. I am not enter­tai­ning any pet theo­ries on the likeli­ne­ss of Ste­ve Jobs ente­ring public poli­tics or run­ning for an office (or his par­ti­cu­lar talents making him a…

  • Data Roaming?

    Coming home from two weeks abroad and some idle time to think, I have a few more topics to blog about. One of them is one of the things I con­sider one of the most obs­ce­ne forms of rip­off the mobi­le pho­ne car­ri­ers do is „data roa­ming.“ If you want to bring your smart­phone online, what…

  • Be afraid. Be very afraid.

    It is a wide­ly held belief that Ste­ve Jobs is a man to trans­form indus­tries. He’s done it befo­re, and I think he (with his com­pa­ny Apple) has set his eyes to do it yet again. This time, it’s tele­pho­ny. And I can’t bla­me him, it is a god-awful indus­try we (as a spe­ci­es, glo­bal­ly)…

  • Lessons in customer support

    I – pro­ba­b­ly along with many, many others of the iPho­ne Twit­ter App – dis­co­ver­ed some­thing that I con­sider a bug. As soon as you rota­te the pho­ne, your posi­ti­on in your time­line is utter­ly garb­led. Whe­re you are after tur­ning has no resem­blan­ce whatsoe­ver to whe­re you were befo­re. That means: Take the pho­ne,…

  • Mailman problems

    For one of lists, one of the sub­scri­bers had the stran­gest pro­blem. He kept get­ting boun­ces that the list ali­as does not even exist, whilst at the same time other sub­scri­bers could well wri­te to that list. It turns out that his mail ser­ver was rewri­ting the To:-address, resol­ving the CNAME of the host­na­me that…

  • Wow. Just wow.

    Hard to belie­ve they actual­ly do this!

  • PowerDNS under MacOS X 10.6.4

    Thanks to an ent­ry on LSD::RELOAD I was final­ly able to get powerdns to run on my MacOS X 10.6.4 system.  Out of per­so­nal pre­fe­rence I wan­ted it to run with post­gres­ql ins­tead of mys­ql, so the­re was a litt­le figu­ring out invol­ved in how to get things going wit­hout the mys­ql dri­ver – appar­ent­ly,…

  • Requiring code in PHP

    While wri­ting the code to hand­le a small form in PHP, I just rea­li­zed that I have a very bad habit – and many just do the same. When I wri­te a new file, I place all the includes at the very top, befo­re any­thing else hap­pens. But in my cur­rent script, the­re are many code…

  • eBooks

    So there’s a new Kind­le that looks quite attrac­ti­ve. Many things on the Kind­le platt­form appear quite nice: You can read the Kind­le books on mul­ti­ple devices (the Kind­le app for iPho­ne and iPad just as well as your desk­top and lap­top com­pu­ter) and have your libra­ry available on all devices equal­ly. The way I…

  • Software I like: Evernote

    I’ve been a user of Ever­no­te for quite a while now, and I must admit that I’m also one of the lovers of that ser­vice. It does data sto­rage the way I felt it should be done. You can access your notes via local appli­ca­ti­ons on desk­top and lap­top, and that works well. I per­so­nal­ly…

  • Home media integration and other televisory matters

    Fol­lo­wing up on my last pos­ting, the­re are a few more things that come to mind when thin­king about the future of TV sets. With all tho­se video strea­ming ser­vices that I want, I also would like inte­gra­ti­on with my lapop (or iPho­ne or iPad, or wha­te­ver other media con­sump­ti­on devices the­re are in the…

  • TV sets and online experience

    It seems that TV sets that offer some form of web con­nec­ti­vi­ty are the latest cra­ze, right next with the 3D stuff that is not yet rea­dy for con­sump­ti­on, at least to my mind. I say web con­nec­ti­vi­ty becau­se it’s about the web more than it is about inter­net con­nec­ti­vi­ty – the TV sets are…

  • My code sucks.

    Cha­sing a link via Twit­ter, I recent­ly read Your code sucks. Having gone over a lot of other people’s code mys­elf, and wri­ting code for long enough to have a good histo­ry of my own work to go over, it reso­na­ted with me.  I recent­ly had the misp­lea­su­re of debug­ging a pie­ce of code that I…

  • More basement finds …

    So if you thought that the last post dates me, see here. This is from the mid eight­ies, magne­tic stripes to save stuff on. One stri­pe held all of 1.2 kb. What fun to remember!

  • URL shortening, a new approach

    The­re is an approach in URL shor­ten­ers that I have not yet seen, but think that has some merit: Store all the infor­ma­ti­on for the URLs in a DNS zone. Store the URLs you point to as TXT records. The zone can then be pul­led and per­used at will. That way, data is never stored…

  • Look what I found!

    Clea­ning up the base­ment (becau­se we had some water lea­king in, but that is a dif­fe­rent mat­ter enti­re­ly), I found stuff that prac­ti­cal­ly makes me feel ancient … 

  • Apple Tablet and convergence

    I’ve writ­ten some of my thoughts on the Apple Tablet befo­re, and my hopes that it will not be using the iPho­ne soft­ware dis­tri­bu­ti­on model. But the­re is ano­ther aspect about the tablet I am going to be very curious about; I think it might be the cen­tral ele­ment to a Apple home media stra­tegy. With…

  • FDA on Twitter

    Via @timoreilly on Twit­ter:  The FDA ope­ra­tes a Twit­ter feed on Recalls: @FDARecalls. Very cool stuff; is the­re any­thing com­pa­ra­ble around in Ger­ma­ny or Europe?

  • Idea for VoIP service

    Some­thing that I would like to see offe­red by any ser­vice – ide­al­ly Sky­pe, but may­be Giz­mo will pick it up – is to have the opti­on of having mul­ti­ple dial-in num­bers: One per country.  This would allow me to be available to my fri­ends and fami­ly in other places at local rates for them,…

  • An iPhone API I’d like to see

    Just tal­king about the iPho­ne, the­re is an API that I’d like to see and I’m sure many appli­ca­ti­ons would bene­fit from: A down­load mana­ger.  I ima­gi­ne that an app could regis­ter to pull the con­tent of a spe­ci­fic URL or the ans­wer from a Web Ser­vice at a spe­ci­fied time or at spe­ci­fied inter­vals,…

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