...more recent posts
From the interesting because it isn't interesting department: Apple released new Mac Pros (their tower computers) on Tuesday. They are nice and extremely powerful (8 cores across the board.) This used to be Apple's flagship product. Almost it's only product. But these days it just doesn't matter. They've become so powerful that they are just niche products. Unless you are doing insanely demanding graphics work (especially 3D graphics or video,) you just don't need one. The iMac and the portable line are way more than enough power for doing anything else, and they are priced much lower than the towers.
I remember when I bought my PowerBook (5 years ago and it's still fine for my work - think about that when pricing Apple's vs. PC's) I wondered why I would ever buy a tower again. And indeed, that's the way it seems to be working out. I could maybe see buying an iMac - especially if I had an iPhone or if Apple comes out with something in the UMPC space - but the days of the consumer tower are over. Just sort of interesting.
Wired article on the creation of the iPhone:
But as important as the iPhone has been to the fortunes of Apple and AT&T, its real impact is on the structure of the $11 billion-a-year US mobile phone industry. For decades, wireless carriers have treated manufacturers like serfs, using access to their networks as leverage to dictate what phones will get made, how much they will cost, and what features will be available on them. Handsets were viewed largely as cheap, disposable lures, massively subsidized to snare subscribers and lock them into using the carriers' proprietary services. But the iPhone upsets that balance of power. Carriers are learning that the right phone - even a pricey one - can win customers and bring in revenue. Now, in the pursuit of an Apple-like contract, every manufacturer is racing to create a phone that consumers will love, instead of one that the carriers approve of. "The iPhone is already changing the way carriers and manufacturers behave," says Michael Olson, a securities analyst at Piper Jaffray.
As usual, just more notes to myself.
I run qmail with virtual domains. To pipe incoming emails for a certain account (foo@example.com) through a PHP script you have to:
1) create a .qmail-foo file in /home/vpopmail/domains/example.com which contains the following line:
|/usr/bin/php -f /path/to/phpscript.php
2) the php script can read the raw email message from stdin like this:
$fd=fopen("php://stdin","r");
while(!feof($fd)){
$email.=fread($fd,1024);
}
fclose($fd);This only works (I think this is right) if foo@example.com is *not* an actual mailbox in qmail. Also I did a qmailctl restart which I'm guessing is needed as well (after creating .qmail-foo file.)
The NSA had a backdoor into Crypto AG machines for decades? That's pretty shocking if it turns out to be true. Why would any country trust an encryption mechanism without understanding the algorithm?
Great story of inventive IT problem solving during a spending freeze: ITAPPMONROBOT
We could build an admin robot...
LM turned me on to a browser webshot service a while ago (you submit a URL and they give you back screen shots of the page taken in a bunch of different browsers on a bunch of different platforms.) Pretty much essential if you're doing serious web design. Lately I've been using browsershots.org which, amazingly, is a free service. Not quite as fast as it's payed brethren, but I can wait a couple minutes.
If these numbers are to be believed (and it's a little hard, I admit, although I'm doing it,) the iPhone already leads Windows Mobile in US marketshare. The iPhone, a single very new device, locked to one wireless carrier's network, already has a larger marketshare (in the US) than *all* Windows Mobile devices, made by multiple vendors, available on all wireless carriers.
Tons of charts and other info at the link.
Great munin tutorial I'm sure I'll need to refer to again.
In Microsoft Word (from Office 2004 Mac edition, at least) if you try to sum a column of numbers with either =SUM(above) or =SUM(below) it will just stop counting at 85 rows no matter how many rows you have! And it gives no error! Holy shit. What a pile of crap. Why can't they be sued for something like this? I wonder how many people have billed incorrectly because of this bug?
Very clever javascript date library: datejs.