Author: rolfje
iChat saves the day
So you are on a nice forum, discussing stuff with people you don’t even know, or even don’t care to get to knowing. They’re just there to exchange thoughts with, and you don’t even care that he’s called “g0d1s.4.f4g” (or worse), and you even don’t know if he is a she. Then in comes this guy and actually uses a readable name, tells you who he is, and talks like he talks in real life. No shorthand, no l33t sp33k, just plain English with typo’s, like any normal, sane person. Even worse, he claims to be a celebrity, wanting to talk to some of his fans without all the security, press and other stuff.It sounds too good to be true, but for Die Hard fans out there, it has really happened!. Complete with screenshots of a video iChat session where Bruce Willis prooves who he is to non-believers.
The thread itself is rather lengthy (more than 1000 posts) and contains a lot of off-topic childish crap before the iCat moment, and after that contains even more crap with people posting useless “Oh my god” messages. But there are some funny comments if you have the time to skim through.
Technology does not sell
Seth Godin did a talk at Google campus in Februari last year. I recently stumbled upon this video of his talk, in which he explains to the Google people why Google sells.
He is very clear in explaining to technology people that technology does not sell. It’s technology that gives you a shot at marketing, nothing more. He makes some very good points which I’ll try to summarize, because the video takes 48 minutes to watch 🙂
Stuff to think about
Normally I try to steer clear of any politics, beliefs, or war on this blog, but I could not resist to link to this google video I found, where Arab-American psychologist Wafa Sultan has some strong words to say to (extremist) Muslims on Al-Jazeera. Although broadcast in February 2006, I just noticed it, and I think she has some good points.
Personaly I don’t believe you should interfere with people’s lives if they’re more than 10km away from your home (and they shouldn’t interfere with yours). Say hello to your neighbour and ask how his/her day went. You’ll notice that you can often help or solve your neighbours problems easily. Stop worrying about those people 10.000km away. If their neighbours follow your example, soon the world will be an even better place!
The Digital Revolution
Nice example of digital revolution and power to the people can be found at http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2007-05-02-n67.html. Let’s hope manufacturers understand that people don’t want to pay for crippled content.
Digital copies where copyright is removed are actually better than their DRM protected originals, which makes good willing people move to pirated content, like I stated earlier. The important sentence here being “If I buy a DVD, I have to watch a few minutes of copyrights notices and commercials, without being able to skip them. If I rip it, and re-write it, these notices are gone…”.
Viva la Revolution!
Give me spots on my Apples
Lately Greenpeace has started a campaign against the usage of hazardous materials by Apple. The campain setup is friendly, nicely designed and urges Apple to choose materials which are less hazadous to the environment.As a spinoff of the Greenpeace campain all kinds of so called “journalists” have begun to put Apple on the “wrong end of the scale” of their “environment-o-meter”, and are happily writing doom articles about what will happen to your Karma if you buy any Apple product. But how environmentally unfriedly are Apple’s computers really?
Disabling the Windows Clipboard
When copy-pasting in Windows, sometimes the clipboard bar appears, and if you’re really “lucky”, it also pops up a waring, distracting you from your work. The clipboard holds only 12 items, and I have never met anyone who used more than one. There is no way to turn this irritating feature off, unless you want to use the dreaded registry editor.
Feeling brave? Follow the instructions at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/207438.
Parameter List Too Long
If your are “fortunate” enough to have to delete a lot of file from a directory on a Unix system, you are likely to encounter the “Parameter List Too Long” problem. This problem is caused by Unix trying to replace the “*” you just used by all names in the directory. This list is then passed to the rm command, which complains that it can not handle that much parameters.
To get around this limitation, you have a couple of options:
Delete all files in the current directory
By far the fastest and most compatible way to delete all files in the current directory without recursing into subdirectories is:
ls | xargs rm
This is the fastest command, because xargs makes sure the maximum allowed number of parameters is passed to rm, resulting in fewer calls/startups to rm.
Delete all files in the current directory and all subdirectories
To delete files not only from the current, but also from all subdirectories, use
find . -name "*" -exec rm -rf {} \;
This is somewhat slower, since rm is executed seperately for each file.
Above commands are tested on AIX and Linux.
Thoughts on Widgets, Gadgets, Screenlets
Just now, I was listening to the Java Posse podcast about the ab5k screenlet framework for Java, and I am finally convinced that software developers are a bunch of crazy, unrealistic, memory-hungry, cpu cycle stealers and by lack of normal people telling them otherwise are proud of it, too. The problem? Look at this list (no particular order):
Apple and EMI follow up
In a previous post I told you that Steve Jobs wants to provide DRM-free music through iTunes, but was held back by music companies. Steve must have had a few long and hard talks, because now EMI and Apple are teaming up to provide high quality DRM-free tracks through the iTunes music store, priced at $1.30. The same track, in a lower sound quality, with DRM costs $0.99. For 30 cents, you get a track you can actually use, with a higher bitrate.
At the same time this could be a trick by Apple to get around the legal issues currently being discussed about iTunes music not being available to other players than the iPod. Smart eh?