Part 40 of elf's Apple PowerBook G4 Journal
iPhone Without a Dataplan?
iphone
Sun Aug 03 23:30:10 2008
If there really is going to be such a thing, then Steve Jobs is an
unquestionable genius. (I try to avoid rumours, but this one is too
reasonable to not mention (and I wish I had thought of it). An
iPhone without a dataplan transforms the device from a luxury, to
an affordable luxury. Apple itself sells an iPhone knock-off before
anyone else can. Brilliant.)
A reliable source, however, says that
the Daily
Mail is "rubbish", hence my hesitation about mentioning this
rumoured device.
Watching Movies
cinema
Tue Aug 05 22:43:30 2008
European movies take more effort to understand more than Hollywood
movies do. I recently watched the extended edition of "The
Conformist" (it included interviews with the director and the
cinematographer). I found that the movie deeper meanings were
revealed after having watched the interviews.
People who watch Hollywood movies know that the dialog and action
tell the story in a straight-forward way, whereas European movies,
also use the costumes, the lighting and the camera-work and the music
also tell the story. I am not accustomed to paying attention to all
those aspects of a film when they are used to tell a story, so I tend
to miss a lot when I watch European movies and end up hating the
movie.
I have found that I have a tendency to "hate" a movie that has won
a Palme d'or. I'll watch it with certain (Hollywood) expectations and
then be completely dissappointed at the end (then I'll wonder if the
jury was on drugs when they awarded the movie the top
prize). Hollywood movies really rot one's perception of what cinema
should be.
Having said that, I'm now going to watch "Raiders of the Lost
Ark".
iPhone Stats
iphone
Wed Aug 06 07:20:16 2008
Various statistics
about the first 1 million iPhones sold (in three days across 21
countries). The top-three are the U.S. (600,000), Japan (70,000)
and Germany (69,000); not counting the U.S., third place goes to
France (67,000). It is (not) surprising that Spain (55,000 and not
a member of the G7) beat Canada (15,000) which had half as many
sales as the U.K. I don't understand the second map (percent of
contract subscriber base).
That's no Moon, That's a Battlestation
ipod iphone
Mon Aug 11 18:47:50 2008
In the past, my boss has mentioned that he sees many iPhones on
the train when commuting to work every day. Today, he was on the
train when a thirty-something sat across from him, wearing the
signature white headphones, talking to himself and holding an
iPhone.
My boss began thinking what would distinguish between an iPod
Touch and the iPhone because his nephew had recently bought an iPod
Touch (even though he wanted an iPhone, he already had a three-year
contract with a carrier which did not carry the iPhone). He looked
at the headphones and noticed that they did not have the squeeze
button that stops the music and answers incoming calls. He laughed
out loud when he realized what was happening. His friend, next to
him, asked what was so funny and my boss pointed to the guy across
from him and said, "He's talking into an 'iTouch' because his
headphones don't have the squeeze thing". At which point the guy
with the iPod Touch stopped talking and put it back into his
pocket. My boss has a naturally loud voice, so he practically
announced to the entire train car that someone was talking into
their iPod.
This tops a student I once saw who had put an Apple sticker over
the logo of his Dell laptop and teens who would buy the white Apple
headphones for they non-iPod mp3 players.
Pulp Fiction
cinema
Tue Aug 12 09:01:20 2008
Last night, I finally managed to watch "Pulp Fiction". I posted my
comments on ##cinema:
<e1f> pretty good. not bad.
<e1f> the lighting was bad is a couple of scenes
<e1f> finally get the joke in the simpsons about the back-room fetishist [00:04]
<e1f> the non-linear nature of the plotting enhances it [00:10]
<e1f> like 'the conformist'
<e1f> it would have been a poorer film if shown linearly
<e1f> the title-cards however, are a mystery
<e1f> used to great effect in kill bill [00:11]
<e1f> are the cards really needed [in pulp fiction]?
This morning, I decided to
read Ebert's
review. Imagine my surprise when I read, "Howard Hawks once
gave his definition of a good movie: `Three good scenes. No bad
scenes.'"— a much more eloquent way of saying, "pretty
good. not bad."
Another surprise was that I enjoyed a movie that won a Palm
D'or; perhaps because it was a Hollywood film and not an European one.
Upgrade to Leopard
Wed Aug 13 16:05:26 2008
I upgraded mathilde from OS X Panther 10.3.9 to Leopard
10.5 last weekend; it took 59 minutes from the time I inserted the
DVD to the time the install completed and it was ready to reboot. I
was able to login 3 minutes later. I had backed-up my account onto
the external Firelight 250GB Firewire disk).
I performed an "Archive and Install", which saves the current
accounts and settings (after selecting the install volume, select
"Options", the check-off "Archive and Install"). I skipped the DVD
check. It initially estimated 1h:48m and then revised it to 51
minutes.
All the applications in my startup folder ran when I logged-in:
Quicksilver and DoubleCommand; I disabled both these
applications as Spotlight now takes over Quicksilver's
functionality and the System Preferences for Keyboard and Mouse
(under Keyboard > Modifier Keys) allows Command, Option, etc. to
be remapped (since Tiger). DoubleCommand is a prefpane, and I have
to look into deleting it off the system.
The only application that didn't seem to work was Thumbscrew. I
downloaded an updated version of it and it worked perfectly.
Spotlight (initially mapped to Ctrl-Space, I changed it to
Alt-Space, after swapping Alt and Cmd) indexing of my HD took 46
minutes and was not noticable in terms of degraded performance.
I deleted 3GB of printer drivers
from /Applications/Printers and three Japanese
dictionaries from /Library/Dictionaries leaving me with
20Gb of free usable space.
I then ran all the programs, MS Word, Call of Duty, Tux Paint,
etc. to verify that they all still ran. Everything was good.
One little annoyance was that mdworker periodically
complained: mdworker: CFPropertyListCreateFromXMLData():
Old-style plist parser: missing semicolon in dictionary. I
have the Console app configured to pop-up and display every time
something is logged so this message gets tiresome. I wish there
was a way to find out which plist was missing the
semicolon. Update Fri Aug 15 05:05:32 2008: filed a
bug-report. Update Sat Aug 16 09:49:57 2008: uploaded
system log, as requested.
On Monday, I downloaded the 561MB 10.5.4 Combo Update (combines
all the updates to bring 10.5.0 up to 10.5.4) and I installed it
the following morning. The update required 1.7GB of space and took
12 minutes to install. The laptop rebooted twice and the second
time it was "stuck" on the blue screen for about 5 minutes with no
feedback. I was worried something went wrong and was making plans
to take it into the Applestore. The laptop eventually booted fine
and I put it to sleep by closing the lid before leaving for
work.
When I returned from work the evening, the sleep-eye was pulsing
but the laptop would not wakeup after opening the lid. The green
light of the charger plug went off and wouldn't turn on again. I
had to Press and hold the power-button to reboot it. Strange.
It remains to be seen what awaits me this evening.
After installing the update, the only thing that was re-set was my
custom keybinding to swap Spaces (1x2 spaces; one for work and one
for play).
Uninstall DoubleCommand
software
Fri Aug 15 05:03:21 2008
I found the instructions
to uninstall
DoubleCommand: delete the DoubleCommand folder in
/Library/StartupItems; Delete the DoubleCommand preference pane in
/Library/PreferencePanes; restart.
Time Machine & Quicklook
software
Sat Aug 16 09:51:19 2008
Before I enabled Time Machine and used my Verbatim Firelight HD I
wanted to know whether Time Machine would a) be able to use a drive
with files already on it, without erasing the drive. The Australian
Mactalk forum has an
excellent Time
Machine FAQ that answered my question— yes, Time Machine
creates a folder on the external drive, without touching other data
already on the disk, and saves the backup files there.
I'm also thinking of buying one or two more of those 250GB
Verbatim drives. My drive has worked nicely whenever I needed to
mule files from my Powerbook at home to my Mini at work. I
transport the drive wrapped in a sheet of bubble wrap and then
enclosed in a semi-rigid plastic drive shipping container
(photograph forthcoming).
I noticed that an executable shell script is not viewable with
Quicklook (it just shows a static icon of a terminal screen), so I
went looking for additional plugins. I
found Quicklook
Plugins has additional useful plugins. Will be installing the
syntax hilighting plugin and the Zip-file viewer plugin.
Date Tip
Mon Aug 18 18:50:37 2008
TUAW has
a awesome
tip on adding the date to the menubar, next to the time. I
added a bullet-symbol (dragged and dropped it from the symbol
palette into the customizer) to separate the date from the
time. Now I don't have to open the Calendar widget or iCal to
verify today's date (my Dock is hidden and so I can't glance at the
iCal icon either).
fs_usage
"os x" software
Thu Aug 21 06:53:00 2008
I learned a new command yesterday (to help with diagnosis of the
earlier mdworker/plist bug-report): fs_usage, which
displays system calls related to file system usage in real-time. I
also discovered that only a single instance of the command can run
and that you have to be root to run it.
John C. Dvorak Blog linkage
mac pc
Thu Aug 21 15:13:55 2008
John C. Dvorak's
blog is linking to an image
on my blog, of a
screen-capture from Seinfeld showing Elaine in Jerry's
apartment and a Mac in the background. There were various
suggestions from #emacs on mischievous image-replacement
scenarios...hehehe... but I demurred.
The Wall Street Journal announced that Jerry Seinfeld was hired by
Microsoft for an advertising campaign (by Chiat/Day) against Apple,
debuting in September. A brilliant coup, I have to admit. Apple can
can only retort by hiring Newman.
I only noticed the image linkage because I was tailing the
acccess.log after we got our NAT became operational after a
hardware failure (it actually failed twice; the second time it
never came up). It was down for about a half-hour each time. I
wonder if the NAT going down had something to do with the extra
traffic. We still haven't done a post-mortem analysis.
Fixyourownprinter.com
harware
Sun Aug 24 10:10:21 2008
Interesting post about a
site
that instructs owners on how to bypass the toner-replacement
sensors on various printers. (I have a Brother HL2040 printer which
prints about 10 pages a year).
Mac Tablet Patent Filings
hardware
Thu Aug 28 16:38:47 2008
Appleinsider has details of Apple's patent filings for the
upcoming Mac tablet interface.
What is Rogers Afraid of?
iphone Rogers
Sat Aug 30 12:42:53 2008
Rogers has extended their limited time offer of $30 for 6GB
dataplan for another month, so that buyers of the latest Blackberry
will also be able to take advantage of it. They also announced
that in the first four weeks following the launch of the iPhone,
95% of users used less than 10% of their dataplan capacity
(i.e. less than 500MB). When the old offer expires, the $30
dataplan will buy 1GB and a new $25 dataplan will buy 500MB—
for 5 more dollars a month you get a dataplan with twice the
capacity. Wouldn't it be logical that if you knew your user's
monthly usage would not approach your artificial limit, that
instead of lowering the quote from 6GB to 1GB, you would instead,
permit unlimited usage? What is Rogers afraid of?
The likeliest reason that the first users of the iPhone are being
conservative of their usage is moost likely the result of not
knowing how much of their data-plan they are consuming (the usage
stats are buried in a menu somewhere on the iPhone) and are thus
afraid of exceeding their limit. Even I didn't know how much
capacity I consumed until I made
a detailed
calculation based on my average daily usage and extrapolated to
calculate an estimated 350MB per month (without streaming Youtube
videos or Gmail usage).
Rogers also said that the maximum charge for exceeding ones dataplan will be
$100 per month, regardless of usage and that they will provide
tools for metering usage and that a text-message will be sent to
users who are nearing their monthly limit.
"The Prisoner" Remake
cinema
Sat Aug 30 18:46:01 2008
AMC is re-making "The Prisoner" as a TV miniseries. Production
details are
being blogged. James
Caviezel plays Number Six and Ian Mckellen plays Number Two.
The Olympics
sport television
Sun Aug 31 06:32:42 2008
The 2008 Olympiad was held in Beijing. I was told the opening
ceremonies were spectacular. I don't have a television so I
wouldn't know. I tried watching it on the internet. The best I
could do was a Youtube clip of the opening ceremonies linked from a
site about typography showing that the Chinese chose Futura Bold to
display the English message (I wonder if there are are there
multiple foundries for Chinese fonts). I
found The
Big Picture's coverage give an adequate sense of the
spectacle.
Canada had its usual mediocre medal performance and the CBC
treated its internet viewers as second-class citizens living in
late 1990s, with pathetically-sized (320x200) clips of some of the
events. I received a standard, "we are sorry you are disappointed
with our coverage", letter in response to my complaint.
At least I enjoyed reading Anthony
Lane's Letter
from Beijing where he laments, "The fact is that the Olympic
Games could happen anywhere. They seem to unfold in a vast and
spotless nowhere. I could have been in Melbourne, or Toronto, where
at least the food would have been better—where the Chinese
food would have been better."
I still cannot believe that Mel Lastman, former mayor of Toronto,
actually made a bid for the Olympics to come to this city. One
brief glance at the decrepit size and state of Union Station would
have been enough for the IOC organizing committee to scoff at the
very idea. It's a zoo when a single rush-hour train gets cancelled
and the passengers have to wait for the next one, while new
passengers arrive. And never mind that just getting onto the train
platforms via two entrances is slow and crowded. Now just imagine
the same scenario with Olympic sized crowds.