Aug 312007

Via Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire:

Marc Ambinder has a copy of a letter DNC Chairman Howard Dean sent to each Democratic presidential candidate today, strongly urging “to do
your part and support the action of the Rules and Bylaws Committee” finding Florida’s advanced primary in non-compliance with delegate selection rules last weekend.

They can go f*** themselves. They just lost my vote. I’m planning to not vote in the next election. There’s no way I’d vote for a republican, and the democrats don’t deserve my vote either. Yes, I know I can vote for the Libertarian candidate, but I’d be making a bigger statement by not voting.

Aug 312007

Finally!

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Via MacNN | The Macintosh News Network:

Toyota on Friday released an iPod Integration Kit that works in all current Toyota and Lexus models. The kit, first announced in early May, is installed in the vehicle’s glove box: it connects Apple’s iPod directly to the car’s audio system and can recharge the iPod’s battery, according to Leftlane News. Once connected, all of the iPod’s functions …

No word on whether it supports the touch screen in a Prius.

Aug 312007

First Rove. Then Gonzales, Now Tony Snow resigned. Any bets on when Cheney will quit?

Aug 292007

Two Years Later

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Exactly two years ago, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. While I was at the gym today, Magnolia Soul by Ozomatli came up in shuffle on my iPhone. A very appropriate song for today.

Aug 292007

Via MetaFilter: Hilly Kristal has died at age 75. First the club, now the man.

Aug 282007

Aug 272007

I tried to sell my old MacBook Pro on eBay. I got one bid, for my original asking price, but when I sent the invoice, the buyer sent me the following email:

i am sorry,i dont wanna buy your laptop because it is old macbookpro.i supposed to new one.

I think I made it very clear here that it’s an old MacBook Pro, not a new one.

This is why I hate eBay. I use it about once a year or less when I have some old equipment to sell. Most of my old Macs I traded in at PowerMax, but since they don’t do BTO, I had to buy my new one directly from Apple.

Aug 262007

Twitter Virus

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It was bound to happen sooner or later. There’s a virus affecting Twitter now. It shows up as a link in someone’s tweet containing Chinese characters. If you click that link, it will post a tweet containing that same link. At least 4 people I’m following have spread it.

Aug 252007

Parallels Build 5120 doesn’t suck

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Competition is definitely a good thing for Mac virtualization software. I had switched to VMware because I found it to be faster than Parallels (at least on my old MacBook Pro). When Parallels released their new beta yesterday I decided to give it another chance and I was pleasantly surprised.

It now feels faster than VMware and the improved Coherence looks great. Unlike VMware, it boots directly into Coherence; with VMware I have to switch manually into Unity after it finishes starting up. It also doesn’t seem to slow down other applications as much as it did on my old MacBook Pro. It does seem to run down the battery faster than VMware if I use it unplugged, though.

Aug 242007
  • If you want to do something that’s going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.

Aug 242007

Via UNEASYsilence:

Scott McCausland was accused of and plead guilty to downloading Star Wars Episode III (Revenge of the Phantom Sith Enterprise Scotty?) and after serving five months in prison (Mind you Cocaine carrying Lohan got only hours) the court ordered that he must have monitoring software installed on his PC and that software is not compatible with Linux. (Read More)

In other words, they’re forcing him to run Windows.

Aug 242007

A great remix

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I found this Topknot, M.I.A. and Cornershop remix at Boing Boing and I’m hooked. I don’t know where it came from originally, but I’d love to hear more like that.

Aug 242007

My headline from yesterday was probably misleading. I only “unlocked” my iPhone so I can install third party software and my own ring tones, but here’s the real deal. George Hotz figured out how to really unlock the iPhone so it can use SIM cards other than AT&T’s, such as T-Mobile, using a hardware hack. Now, the people at iphoneSIMfree.com have found a software-only hack for unlocking an iPhone.

Since I already have a two year contract with AT&T, which I had even before I got my iPhone, there’s no reason for me to do it.

Aug 232007

iPhone Unlocked

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I finally got brave enough to install the Installer App on my iPhone so I can use third party software. The apps I installed so far are Launcher, SendSong, Lights Off, Finder, and Term vt100. I can also now connect to it via ssh.

Aug 232007

Aug 232007

Engadget tells of someone receiving a Dell XPS M1330 laptop without an OS, no system BIOS and several other defects.

The $2k+ laptop looked fine at first glance, but when Pradeep popped it open and hit the power button, it immediately booted to a blank, white, flickering screen. After 10 minutes, nothing had changed, no Dell logo, Vista boot screen or anything — not only had Dell forgotten an OS, they didn’t even manage to squeeze in a system BIOS before they shipped this one. That wasn’t all that Dell screwed up on this M1330, the power button is defective, the Microsoft seal underneath the machine is partially ripped and burned, there’s a problem with a grill cover protruding, and the WiFi radio switch is so loose it almost falls off when pushed back and forth.

Aug 222007

When writing Objective C code, never forget to have your init method return self or bad things will happen, but maybe not in a debug build. I wasted over an hour on that today when my debug build worked perfectly but a release build crashed in awakeFromNib where it was initializing a series of items for a TabView. One of them had an init method that looked like this:

- (id)init
{
	if (self = [super init]) {
		[self loadStateNames];
	}
	// oops - I forgot something here
}


For some mysterious reason it didn’t fail in a debug build, and I couldn’t place a breakpoint to debug a release build, so I had to resort to “ghetto debugging” using CFShow. Instead of a panel object, I was seeing an array of state names! Adding return self; cured it.

Aug 222007

Via B12 Solipsism :

The first time came one Thanksgiving when he decided to drive down to a Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank.‘Highway 5 was empty that night and I made good time and was surprised to discover that the Prius was very stable, even with major gusting winds,’ Wozniak said.

photo.jpg

Aug 212007

Via Laptop Security Blog:

Education Week has published an article which indicates that Social Networking can have educational benefits. According to a survey commissioned by the National School Boards Association (NSBA), 50% of teens say they talk to their peers about schoolwork online (IM, blog or social networking sites) or via text message. A larger proportion (60%) indicate that they discuss education-related topics such as college and career planning. According to the survey, 96% of students with access to the Internet build social networks. That more than 50% of these students discuss education is promising for educators. NSBA says that Social Networking technologies should be adapted for use in the classroom.

‘When it’s another generation’s technology, it’s easy to be uncomfortable with it and say we don’t need it,’ said Ann Flynn, the NSBA’s director of educational technology. ‘We want to say to people, explore these things. Figure out what kinds of tools they are. By no means are we saying people shouldn’t be safe. But we also don’t want to see policies that are so restrictive that the unintended consequence is to keep the technology out of the hands of educators.’

The NSBA suggests setting up chat rooms or blogs where students can talk about, and collaborate on, schoolwork. They also suggest altering policies that ban or restrict the use of these sites while at school. The survey found that the reports of cyberbullying or online bullying could be out of proportion to the fear induced by it. Their report indicated that 7% of students surveyed said they were victims of cyberbullying – this is much less than the 32% indicated in a survey by PEW conducted earlier this summer. The NSBA survey also included a separate study on how districts use technology. 96% of the district leaders interviewed say that teachers assign homework via the Internet, and nearly half of the schools go online for collaborative projects with other schools. Currently, 80% of schools ban chat software, and more than 50% ban the use of social networking sites. This policy may be too restrictive. Social networking can be embraced for its ‘social’ modes of learning, and with education on Internet safety, can be a valuable educational tool.

Read the full article here.

Aug 212007

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