Slippery Oil Price

What in the world is going on with the price of oil? Just a few months ago, in June 2008, it was $140 a barrel and now it's less than $97. The high price was justified because of demand, but what justifies the drop? Surely, the demand has not dropped 40% in four months?

<tinfoil-hat>
Surely it has nothing to do with keeping Oil as the primary energy source? With a oil price above $130, it makes economical sense to develop alternative sources of energy. With the oil price dropping, this might not be the case anymore. So the investments in alternative energy sources will come to a halt. And oil remains the primary energy source.
</tinfoil-hat>

Zaaf

iPhone App Store exclusion policy

Apple's application store for the iPhone and iPod Touch has some nice things about it: One central point for the developer to promote his app, one central point where the billing and accounting is done. For me as a user it has some nice points as well in that it is the only place I need to look if I want to find an app or an app update.

However, since Apple is also the one allowing or disallowing applications based on their functionality, this single point of entry is not so shiny. In the past, Apple removed the I'm Rich app that cost $999,- because it did not have any functionality. The other thay, a genuine podcatcher application with more functionality than the iTunes / iPhone combination was rejected because it duplicated Apple functionality. Read about it here. Ultimately this will lead to the Worst Case Scenario Extrapolating From the iTunes App Store, Fully-Expressed in the Form of a Single Tweet by Steven Frank

(For those to lazy to click):

Scenario: Apple makes code-signing mandatory for desktop Mac applications. You can now only buy them through iTunes. Think it can't happen?

Scary isn't it? When that happens, the Mac-platform as we know and love it will be dead.

Zaaf

Reduce Mac Pricing?

In a recent article, ars technica suggests that Apple should reduce the prices of their products in order to gain market share. In my non-statistically sound experience of buying two high-end Apple-branded laptops I can definitely state that macs have become a lot cheaper.
My first ever Macintosh computer was an Apple Titanium Powerbook G4 667MHz with 30GBytes of hard drive and 512MBytes of RAM, which I bought for € 3229 (excluding 19% sales tax) on March 30th, 2002. I recently bought a MacBook Pro 2.5GHz core 2 duo with 250GBytes of hard drive and 4GBytes of RAM for € 1995 (excluding 19% sales tax). My TiBook had only half of its maximum RAM where the MacBook Pro has its full RAM allotment. So over the course of six and a half years, the high end Apple Macintosh laptop has become 38% cheaper.

I wouldn't mind if Apple dropped their prices even more, but I'm not complaining about their current prices.

Zaaf

Sloppy Brits spill data beans

The past year or so, I've heard plenty of reports on UK institutions losing data to the public. This latest article is of a bank selling an old PC on eBay without properly destroying the data on it. Somehow I find it difficult to believe that these type of accidents only happen in the UK. Why wouldn't it happen in other European countries?

So, the big question here is: "Are the Brits very sloppy with their data, or are they just not so good at covering it up?"

Zaaf

No iPhone for me

Lately, I've been looking more and more seriously at the iPhone. T-Mobile started carrying it on the 11th of July and its subscription fees are not so horrendous as to make it improbable for me to even consider it. Switching to the iPhone would make me pay roughly twice as much on a monthly basis as my current T-Mobile subscription, which is steep, but then again, I plan to use the data access a lot more with the iPhone than compared with my current phone.

However, a short trip to the T-Mobile store confirmed that I have to wait until my subscription ends before I'm allowed to pay T-Mobile more money on a monthly basis. And since my subscription ends somewhere in 2010 this means no iPhone for me. The bright side of this is of course that all the current 3G-issues plaguing the iPhone will be solved, presumably to be replaced by new issues for new features.

So no iPhone for me (for now),

Zaaf

Mac is Back

Last week, I bought a new MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, there were some issues with the keyboard and the multi touch trackpad. When typing heavily, sometimes the keyboard and trackpad would stop working. A bluetooth mouse however still worked and a reboot cleared the issue. The console.log file displayed things like:
Aug 4 14:18:21 zaafBook kernel[0]: AppleUSBMultitouchDebug: data length is 0 in enqueueData
Aug 4 14:22:37 zaafBook kernel[0]: AppleUSBMultitouchDriver::_deviceGetReport: DeviceRequest (interface 0, reportID 0x0) returned error 0xe00002ed
Aug 4 14:22:37 zaafBook kernel[0]: AppleUSBMultitouchDebug: _deviceGetReport returned an error in configureDataMode

After having had to reboot six times in two days because of this, I got tired of it and went back to the shop. Here they declared it DOA (Dead On Arrival) and could I please provide the box it came in? Unfortunately, the box had fallen victim to our belated spring cleaning activities and was already lost to mankind. This meant they had to replace the topcase, which took them until yesterday to fix.

I've been playing with my MacBook Pro for a few hours and I've not yet seen the issues I was plagued with. So I'm happy to see that my newest Mac is Back,

Zaaf

From Subject to Object

A few weeks ago Apple introduced MobileMe as a replacement for .Mac. As has been noted, Apple, with this change, went from a Subject based i approach, to a Object based me approach. As noted in the above linked article this means the following:

Signs do, however, point clearly to Apple steering away from consumer as creator of data and toward consumer as data itself. I no longer create the data I sync, the data is me and it syncs on its own.

For the past seven years, I've been heavily involved in defining relationship types with a Subject Type and Object Type. And therefor I feel that I can add my own two cents to it. The way I see it is that the subject attributes something to the object. That something is normally either described by a role or by a verb phrase. For example, the i in for example iPhoto attributes photos to iPhoto. Now for MobileMe. Here we have an Object Type: Me and a role description: Mobile. The trick is now to find out what is attributing to the mobile me. Is that the I from the apps in iCal, iTunes, iMovie et cetera? Or can it be Apple? Or the notorious Cloud?

In my opinion, it is I that is contributing to me. And to which me? I'm quite sure that I can have multiple Me's because I have multiple I's. For example, when asked at a party where my car is, I might answer I'm parked over there, at the end of the parking lot. And, since I can have multiple I's, I'm sure I can have multiple me's too. In this case it would be a Mobile Me. This leads me to the fact that I am contributing to the Me that is on the road, or at least away from my PC. In this light, MobileMe can be seen as part of the ongoing evolution that removes the ties to the home PC and enables mobility.
This evolution started with the need for remote access and dumb terminals via teletype. Then the home PC came cutting the ties with the work environment and the mainframe computers. After the home PC became the central server of all personal data, a further tie was cut with the increased popularity of notebook and laptop computers. As technology advanced, the PDA's and mobile phones became more and more popular. Now we have the combination of internet access via cloud computing and an able wireless infrastructure that allows true mobile access. It is exactly this that is enabled by the introduction of MobileMe. It fits both with the description on Apple's pages and with the naming of the service: MobileMe.

In short, the move from Subject to Object in the name is based upon the shift from home computing to wireless access everywhere with small personal devices like the iPhone.

Zaaf

Spring cleaning time

Everyone of us probably has that big box of cables and assorted electronic gear that's been gathering dust over the past years. In my case there were two boxes, plus some cables lying in the proximity of the boxes and the computer. Today I took the opportunity to go through all of my cables and stuff and decide what to throw away. For fun's sake I made a list:

1. Apple Powerbook G4 667MHz with power adapter, spare power cord and two spare batteries;
2. IOmega Zip Drive with parallel interface, including parallel cable and power adapter;
3. 40GByte iPod 3G, with the black and white interface and a broken hard drive;
4. Palm m505 with usb cradle and power adapter;
5. Belkin USB 2.0 riser card that was used in my PowerMac;
6. Sony battery charger for the 20th anniversary walkman;
7. 10/100 Mb Ethernet card;
8. ATA 100 raid card;
9. 3 parallel ATA 66 cables;
10. Creative Soundblaster microphone from 1995;
11. Broken Sony earbuds;
12. Sennheiser earbuds;
13. Sweex 128MB MP3 player with earbuds;
14. RF-plug male;
15. Palm 16MB SD Card;
16. Compaq two button ps/2 ball mouse;
17. Trust mouse to go with their touch pad;
18. Logitech 3 button ps/2 ball mouse;
19. Logitech 2 button ps/2 ball mouse;
20. Logitech scroll wheel usb optical mouse;
21. small 2 button usb optical mouse;
22. Parallel Cable;
23. RS 232C to Parallel adapter;
24. RF TV splitter;
25. 6.8GB Maxtor HDD;
26. USB charge stand;
27. 3 uk-style power cords, one with a 3A fuse;
28. 2 grounded power cords;
29. USB WIFI access point;
30. DV-in enabler for Sony handycams;
31. Bose holding etui for their horrible in-earbuds;
32. USB enclosure for hard drives, including 30 GB HDD and power adapter;
33. USB enclosure for hard drives, including 80 GB HDD and power adapter;
34. Two HDD enclosures with mounting brackets for swapping hard drives in a PC-Tower, including a 8GB and a 20GB hard drive
35. four-way USB hub with power adapter;
36. 15 meter of telephone wire;
37. telephone wire with ethernet-style plug and wall socket plug;
38. USB to PS/2 adapter;
39. 42 3 1/4" diskettes;
40. Wall mounting bracket for original "ufo" Airport;
41. Din 4-pin to Din 4-pin cable;

That's the lot. And when we go through other boxes and shelves, I'm sure that we'll find a lot more obsolete hardware. Still it feels weird to do the spring cleaning in the summer holidays.

Zaaf

Turned a new leaf

Yesterday, after finally receiving a nice bonus from my previous employer, I went to my local Apple dealer and got myself a shiny new machine. After my PowerBook died on me, I tried to use my iPod Touch as the web browser for the living room. However, due to some limitations of both the hardware and some web sites, I decided to treat myself to a new MacBook Pro.
And after receiving my final paycheck from my previous employer, I went ahead and bought the 2.5 GHz, 4GB Ram MacBook Pro, together with a time capsule for my backups and a new wireless mouse. I now can browse the web again while watching a movie.

This is so much more enjoyable than sitting in the attic with my Mac Pro and missing the ins and outs of the series my wife follows on TV.

Zaaf

Webpage junk

We're all familiar with the issue. Most of the time, when reading an article on a newspaper website, the information is in one column in the middle, flanked on the left with some navigational bits and on the right with some advertising pieces. We all know it and most of the time we don't look at it anymore. The web browser on the iPhone / iPod Touch however lets you zoom in on the text you want to read, thereby missing out on the junk surrounding it. This makes for a great uncluttered reading experience. So much so that when I switched back to reading news on a laptop instead of my iPod Touch, I immediately started to double tap on the column containing the article.

As a side note, some weeks ago I participated as a user in a usability test for a new website. The lady conducting the test noticed that I did not look at the information displayed at the left and right of the centre. Instead I just scrolled down to read that same information. So it would appear that my Mobile Safari webpage reading habits are already the dominant way of reading a web site.

So Web-developers, please stay in the centre and deliver us from junk,

Zaaf

New eye on the world

Just in time for the summer holidays, I bought a new, small and lightweight 1080p HD widescreen Sony video camera. It's a nice looking thing that records only to sony memory sticks. It's name is the Sony HDR TG3E. Now that's what I call a sexy name! I wish more companies would uses letter / number combinations for their product names. It just rolls of your tongue so easily doesn't it? HDR TG3E. It's great! It's so unlike those boring Apple names like "iPhone" and "MacBook". No, Sony gets it!

Anyway, this camera is so small, that they omitted the view finder, which makes it rather awkward to use in sunny spots. The other thing they did with it is move most of the controls to the touchscreen. And Sony is so confident that it's easy to use, that they don't even provide a booklet on how to get started. This lack of buttons and view finder makes it a very attractive looking camera, which of course, they had to undo a bit by plastering all kinds of stickers on them to advertise it greatness.

The good things about this camera are:

• It's very light and small, meaning that it easily fits in the pocket of your coat. However, since I bought it for the summer holidays, this is a moot point because I don't wear coats in summer.
• Because there is no view finder, you need the screen to film. Sony made it so, that the camera starts the moment you flip open the screen, thus saving another button.
• The fact that it uses memory sticks instead of tape means that it starts very fast. It even has an automatic stand-by mode that makes it even faster to stop and re-start filming.
• The memory card also gets rid of the fear that you tape over a previous scene.
• The zooming button is slowed down considerably compared to my previous camera, making it almost impossible to zoom too fast in a shot.
• Getting rid of the tape means that transferring your video from the camera can be done at much higher speeds, without the possibility of frames that are dropped. With a tape, there is always the possibility that the computer is too busy with other things to be able to capture al frames. With a memory card, this is no longer an issue because it has direct access.

Of course there are also some bad things about it:

• The battery has a small capacity. You can only shoot up to 40 minutes of video with it.
• The battery is placed inside the camera, making it look nice, but disallowing you to attach a bigger capacity battery.
• The Wide-angle on the lens is not very wide. Making some shots hard to capture. I've ran into this more times than I would like.

But overall, I'm quite pleased with this new camera. If you want, you can find some films at YouTube.

Zaaf

Television = Fake Reality

This morning, I showed my kids a few YouTube clips on my Apple-TV. They were discussing the various types of stunts that can be performed on a bicycle. The weird thing was that each time a great bike riding stunt was performed, they asked me of of was real or just some movie-trick. Apparently, they treat everything they see on TV as made- up and the only films on TV that are real are those that we shot ourselves.

Somehow I'm glad that they see things this way,

Zaaf

Turn to a new leaf in a new book

As I wrote before, my PowerBook decided to die. I did indeed manage to salvage my data by booting into FireWire Target mode after holding down the ‘T’ on startup. This allowed me to copy over my complete ~/. directory.
The harddisk seemed to be alright as /sbin/fsck -fy did not find any issues. Next step I took was zeroing out the harddisk drive and cleanly install Tiger on it. The format stage went fine, the install stage however ended half-way through in an official kernel panic. So something somewhere must be fried. And presumably it's on the logic board.

All in all this means I'm in the market for a new laptop. It is time to close the Book of Power for the last time and turn over a new leaf in a new book. Most likely it will be the Book of Mac. I had my eye cast towards the MacBook Air, but its lack of target FireWire mode made me reconsider this, especially after this recent mishap. So it's time to draw up my requirements for a new MacBook. And in my head they're already skewed towards the 15" MacBook Pro. In fact I already configured one in the Online Apple Store but I decided to wait until I can justify it for myself.

Time will tell,

Zaaf

Running out of Power (book)

Last night, my trusty PowerBook decided to kernel panic on me. And now every app I open results in a segmentation fault. This is not so good. It seems that after only 6.3 years it's already running out of power. Maybe I can resurrect it by installing Tiger afresh onto it. And maybe I can salvage my ~/Library by booting it in Target Firewire mode and connecting it to my Mac Pro, but that's not very likely. If only Apple showed new MacBook Pros during the Stevenote at WWDC. It would make the decision much easier.

On the other hand I get a Lenovo Vistaster laptop from my work to use everywhere, so maybe I can use that at home for surfing on the couch.

We'll see,

Zaaf

Double the oil

I just noticed something interesting in the ratio between the price of a barrel of crude oil and the gasoline price in The Netherlands.

In the year 2000, the average price of a barrel of crude oil was $ 33.40 and a liter of normal gasoline at the pump was 2.70 guilders, or € 1.22. Today, the 22nd of May 2008, oil peaked at $ 135 and a liter of normal gasoline at the pump is € 1.55.

This means that the price of oil quadrupled, but the price of gasoline only increased 37%. So why is the price of our gas so low?


To check the gasoline prices, check http://www.shell.com/home/nl-nl/html/iwgen/app_profile/nl-nl_hoeveelkost.html. The price in 2000 is from 21-06-2000. The price in 2008 is from 22-05-2008.

Now watch

Finally my 2007 bonus arrived. Last Christmas, I saw a nice watch at the local jeweler store. It's an Issey Miyake produced watch by the designer TO. And immediately I was captured by the stark simplicity of the design. I promised myself to buy it when my bonus arrived, so last Wednesday, I left work early to stop by the jeweler and now I'm the proud owner of this wonderful new watch.



Watch and see,

Zaaf

Olympic Choice

Currently there is a big call towards sportsmen not to go to the 2008 olympic games in China, mainly because of the way human rights are treated. There are a lot of issues clouding this issue and they all need consideration before I can state my opinion on it. However, one issue is bugging me and that is that the call is being made to those who had nothing to do with choosing China as the host of the 2008 games. I feels weird that the sportsmen have to suffer from someone else's decision.

Zaaf

3x4 makes 16

I just found out that my beloved Mac Pro had been swapping. This is not to be tolerated, so I went to the shop and treated my Mac Pro, and myself of course, to three packets of four gigabyte of ram. These packets contain two DIMMs of two gigabytes each. So now, together with the four gigabytes already installed, I've got a grand total of 16 GB of ram. And I'm still amazed at how easy it is to install it. Open up the side, pull out the two memory boards, insert the DIMMS and put the two boards back again. And because the memory riser boards are laying in front of you when you do this, there is now awkward positioning of hands and or readjustments of cables needed to perform this. Very convenient.

Zaaf

Do The Album Shuffle

It appears that I was wrong about one part of the iPod app on my new iPod Touch. The order of playlists is preserved. This means that, with great help of the intertubes, I was able to create an applescript that shuffles my albums in random order, but leaving the song order in tact. This applescript creates a playlist called Random, or if that exists, removes everything from it. It then takes the playlist "All Albums" and adds the albums for every song to a list. It skips the album if the album of the previous song had the same name. For this to work, the playlist has to be sorted on album of course. It then takes a random album and counts the number of songs on it and if there's more than one song in the album, it's added to the playlist.

If you're interested, you can find the script here.

Have fun,

Zaaf

Touch SDK outside the US?

Just a small blurb to complain to Apple about the availability of the iPhone developer program. Last week Apple released a mature set of tools to develop applications for their touch computers. It comes complete with a simulator and a remote debugger. The integration with Apples IDE XCode is seemless and within an hour after downloading the 2.1 GB package I had my own version of the obligatory Hello World program. Trying to run it on my iPod Touch however resulted in a compiler error stating that I do not have the required certificate.
It turns out that such a certificate will cost $99 and is only available to US residents after their application to enter the developer program is accepted by Apple. Hmmm, I really wanted to develop some silly apps like Memory and a Scientific Calculator, but now it seems that I have to wait seemingly indefinitely before running it outside the simulator.

Zaaf