tech

I saw a Facebook user have his account hijacked recently, and used to spam a lot of contacts with wall messages pointing his mates to sites (DON'T VISIT THESE SITES) like -

• sobgroan.com
• scrambleweep.com
• whipchime.com
• floatfaint.com
• slideleap.com
• votebeep.com
• singhoot.com
• roargroan.com
• clapspray.com
• wavehum.com
• gigglesail.com
• thumpwish.com
• spoilroll.com
• spoilhike.com
• ridepush.com
• swinghiss.com

This particular dialog deserves a special place in user interface hell. It doesn't win any points back for coming from Cupertino. It scores a couple for irony alone, that's it.

If you use the latest, greatest version of iTunes and dare add some MP3s or videos to your iPod which can't be played, or which are momentarily unavailable (external HD not connected) when iTunes wakes from its slumber, you will be delighted to meet this dialog.

What's so bad? This baby is straight from Redmond. It's an application-modal dialog that has an OK button. It's got Aqua (ooh), it's got an internal scrolling pane, but that's it. Does it try to help you solve the problem? Nope. In fact, it seems to be going out of its way to make it impossible to solve, and I guarantee that if you see this dialog once, you'll be seeing it a few times unless you've got a pen handy.

Unless you're the "ignore this problem entirely" kinda person, that is. It does have a checkbox for that.

But if you want to solve the problem, then you might hope that this window would give you a few options:

• Automatically fix these tracks. (Convert the tracks which can't be played, prompt to find the tracks which can't be found.)
• Make a new playlist of these tracks, so I can re-convert them / delete them / fix 'em up later
• Just remove these tracks from the iPod playlist, thanks

Failing that, you'd probably expect to be able to select the tracks in that little scrolling window and copy them. Right? Wrong. (Note the ironic subtext - "For a list of items that could not be copied, click below." The programmer meant what he said; you can't copy them all, and you can't copy each single one, either.)

So. Grab yer pen. Write down the track names. And promise yourself you'll fix it up before next time.

prize today to telecom for "we can't log you out, the authentication system is down"

nice. (this blog is rapidly turning into a cache of stupid software messages, innit?)

there is actually a hidden message in this dialog, which appears when you click the button labelled "erase all annotations" in skype desktop-sharing app yugma

a quick little experiment with automator (amyl recommended it, and it is kinda cool!) to use kextload / kextunload to swap between active and passive drivers with a Ralink RT73 USB dongle

ralink's drivers are silly and don't go away when the party's over, which makes kismac feel crowded and sensitive

enjoy and improve

raloader-v0001alpha1.zip

disclaimer: beware, may destroy the entire known universe - check the automator source to feel shiny and safe

http://kismac.tehbin.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=617

I'm hoping to get either of these cheap NZ Nokias working with Gnokii. Suggestions welcome!

The Vodafone-branded Nokia 1110i is an entry-level GSM phone. It has what looks like a micro-USB connector on the bottom, but I think it's actually smaller than micro-USB and looks like a different shape. (I need to go check this at a local tech shop - don't have the cable here - do you recognise it?)

*#0000# prints "N1110i v6.40 / 12-01-07 / RH-93 / (c)NMP / Language: MA"

The Telecom-branded Nokia 2125 is an entry-level CDMA phone. It connects and IDs using my (non-Nokia) CA-42 USB cable, but I haven't found the correct Gnokii config for it yet (or it's not yet supported). It has a model ID of RH-71. *#0000# prints only "Nokia 2125" on screen - no other info is displayed. The only languages available on this particular handset are English and Indonesian.

Also on the workbench are a Nokia 3100 (which appears to handle Gnokii flawlessly ... but never gets a network connection because the aerial has been damaged) and a few others which show less potential (no handy-dandy connectors).

My requests for v1.4 of the excellent Slife app:

• As well as automatically discovering what apps I use, automatically hide the apps I don't use in any given day / week / month view. It would make the information much more concise.
• Extract a sensible colour for each app from its current icon, so I can easily match the lines to what I see in my dock.
• Activities are great, if you remember to update them. Think about querying the user for what they've done in the last hour. If there's a plugin-able typing break software for OSX, talk to that.
• If not, think about making a plugin-able typing break software for OSX which does the above, because this would be soooo close to a perfect combo (in my book as well).
• If you close the distance between what you're doing and generating output that can drive invoicing, you will have a killer business app.

I may update this list ... if I think of anything else ...

from wired, giant robot imprisons parked cars. nothing really to do with giant robot, silly. actually a good pointer for why you might want to check the license on that shinkwrapped software before you base your business model on it. what if your business model walks out the door with the developer? POOS!

http://josiahcole.com/2007/02/14/a-webmasters-19-commandments/

thanks JP for this and the previous vid :)

copied from slashdot, this is not my story :)

A long time ago, when computers remembered using little donuts made of rust, I worked on on a mainframe computer system (CP/V) that supported batch, timesharing, realtime, the works. It had performance monitoring tools, and a large basketload of parameters for sys admins to twiddle.

One of our favorite parameters was SL:BB, documented as batch bias, an input to the process scheduler. When someone called or wrote to us saying they were having problems with performance tuning, we usually suggested they redo their tests varying the setting of SL:BB and let us know what happened. Try different values, 0, 1, 5, 20, 50, 100, things like that. Try it and get back to us.

And lo, they would go off and redo performance runs, and report back.

And we would collect their results and go and muse over them, usually over beer.

SL:BB told us a lot about the user, because SL:BB was a knob that wasn't connected to anything. Oh, the value was range-checked by the parameter setting tool, and dutifully stored in memory, and displayed on performance displays, but it didn't change system performance in any way at all.

That's not what the documentation said, but who believes documentation? We had plans for SL:BB, we just hadn't gotten around to writing the code yet.

So if the user reported that setting SL:BB to 25, but not 24 or 26 gave them incredibly better (or worse) results, we definitely factored that into our analysis.

Those that reported back that the setting of SL:BB didn't make a damn bit of difference, and there were some, we honored as brothers, took into our confidences, and shared beer with at the soonest opportunity. Their bug reports and feature requests received far more attention, for they had passed an important test.