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Speaking at SLUUG: Amazing, Stupendous, Mind-Blowing Apps for iPad2

business, personal, technology / /

Jans Carton & I are delivering a talk at the St. Louis UNIX Users Group at 6:30 pm this Wednesday, 8 June 2011, titled “Amazing, Stupendous, Mind-Blowing Apps for iPad2”. We’ll be demoing iPad apps live for everyone. If you want to find out more about the iPad, or discover some awesome new iPad apps, then come hear Jans & I speak.

Here’s the complete description:

It’s becoming crystal clear that tablets and other mobile devices are leading the computing revolution into the next decade, and at the forefront (at least for now) is Apple’s iPad. Scott Granneman & Jans Carton will demonstrate iPad apps that they find particularly useful, cool, or amazing – sometimes all three at the same time! You’ll see apps for everything from video to games to reading to productivity, and much, much more. We guarantee you’ll see something that makes you think, and something else that makes you go “Wow!”.

The meeting will be held at Graybar Electric Co., Inc. at 11885 Lackland Road, 63146. Directions are at http://sluug.org/resources/meeting_info/map_graybar.shtml, & a Google Map can be found at http://goo.gl/maps/jnpX.

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David Pogue’s insights about tech over time

business, history, technology / /

From David Pogue’s “The Lessons of 10 Years of Talking Tech” (The New York Times: 25 November 2010):

As tech decades go, this one has been a jaw-dropper. Since my first column in 2000, the tech world has not so much blossomed as exploded. Think of all the commonplace tech that didn’t even exist 10 years ago: HDTV, Blu-ray, GPS, Wi-Fi, Gmail, YouTube, iPod, iPhone, Kindle, Xbox, Wii, Facebook, Twitter, Android, online music stores, streaming movies and on and on.

…

With the turkey cooking, this seems like a good moment to review, to reminisce — and to distill some insight from the first decade in the new tech millennium.

Things don’t replace things; they just splinter. I can’t tell you how exhausting it is to keep hearing pundits say that some product is the “iPhone killer” or the “Kindle killer.” Listen, dudes: the history of consumer tech is branching, not replacing.

…

Things don’t replace things; they just add on. Sooner or later, everything goes on-demand. The last 10 years have brought a sweeping switch from tape and paper storage to digital downloads. Music, TV shows, movies, photos and now books and newspapers. We want instant access. We want it easy.

…

Some people’s gadgets determine their self-esteem. … Today’s gadgets are intensely personal. Your phone or camera or music player makes a statement, reflects your style and character. No wonder some people interpret criticisms of a product as a criticism of their choices. By extension, it’s a critique of them.

…

Everybody reads with a lens. … feelings run just as strongly in the tech realm. You can’t use the word “Apple,” “Microsoft” or “Google” in a sentence these days without stirring up emotion.

…

It’s not that hard to tell the winners from the losers. … There was the Microsoft Spot Watch (2003). This was a wireless wristwatch that could display your appointments and messages — but cost $10 a month, had to be recharged nightly and wouldn’t work outside your home city unless you filled out a Web form in advance.

…

Some concepts’ time may never come. The same “breakthrough” ideas keep surfacing — and bombing, year after year. For the love of Mike, people, nobody wants videophones!

…

Teenagers do not want “communicators” that do nothing but send text messages, either (AT&T Ogo, Sony Mylo, Motorola V200). People do not want to surf the Internet on their TV screens (WebTV, AOLTV, Google TV). And give it up on the stripped-down kitchen “Internet appliances” (3Com Audrey, Netpliance i-Opener, Virgin Webplayer). Nobody has ever bought one, and nobody ever will.

Forget about forever — nothing lasts a year. Of the thousands of products I’ve reviewed in 10 years, only a handful are still on the market. Oh, you can find some gadgets whose descendants are still around: iPod, BlackBerry, Internet Explorer and so on.

But it’s mind-frying to contemplate the millions of dollars and person-years that were spent on products and services that now fill the Great Tech Graveyard: Olympus M-Robe. PocketPC. Smart Display. MicroMV. MSN Explorer. Aibo. All those PlaysForSure music players, all those Palm organizers, all those GPS units you had to load up with maps from your computer.

Everybody knows that’s the way tech goes. The trick is to accept your
gadget’s obsolescence at the time you buy it…

Nobody can keep up. Everywhere I go, I meet people who express the same reaction to consumer tech today: there’s too much stuff coming too fast. It’s impossible to keep up with trends, to know what to buy, to avoid feeling left behind. They’re right. There’s never been a period of greater technological change. You couldn’t keep up with all of it if you tried.

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Apple’s role in technology

business, history, tech in changing society, technology / /
Image representing iPhone as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase

From Doc Searls’s “The Most Personal Device” (Linux Journal: 1 March 2009):

My friend Keith Hopper made an interesting observation recently. He said one of Apple’s roles in the world is finding categories where progress is logjammed, and opening things up by coming out with a single solution that takes care of everything, from the bottom to the top. Apple did it with graphical computing, with .mp3 players, with on-line music sales and now with smartphones. In each case, it opens up whole new territories that can then be settled and expanded by other products, services and companies. Yes, it’s closed and controlling and the rest of it. But what matters is the new markets that open up.

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A fix for Apple Mail’s inability to search Entire Message

tech help / /

Spotlight
Creative Commons License photo credit: Ti.mo

When using Apple Mail, you should be able to search for a term in From, To, Subject, & Entire Message. However, today I could no longer search Entire Message. It was grayed out & completely unavailable.

I found interesting info on the following pages, with the last being the most helpful:

  • http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=6653445#6653445
  • http://www.bronzefinger.com/archives/2006/04/apple_mail_sear.html
  • http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=5934412#5934412
  • http://forums.macworld.com/message/425508
  • http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080201111317585

I closed Mail and tried this, which re-indexes the entire hard drive in Spotlight:

sudo mdutil -E /

But it did nothing. Then I did this, which re-indexes just the Mail folders in Spotlight:

mdimport ~/Library/Mail

That fixed it.

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Steve Jobs on mediocrity & market share

business, history, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Steven Levy’s “OK, Mac, Make a Wish: Apple’s ‘computer for the rest of us’ is, insanely, 20” (Newsweek: 2 February 2004):

If that’s so, then why is the Mac market share, even after Apple’s recent revival, sputtering at a measly 5 percent? Jobs has a theory about that, too. Once a company devises a great product, he says, it has a monopoly in that realm, and concentrates less on innovation than protecting its turf. “The Mac user interface was a 10-year monopoly,” says Jobs. “Who ended up running the company? Sales guys. At the critical juncture in the late ’80s, when they should have gone for market share, they went for profits. They made obscene profits for several years. And their products became mediocre. And then their monopoly ended with Windows 95. They behaved like a monopoly, and it came back to bite them, which always happens.”

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Reasons Windows has a poor security architecture

security / /

From Daniel Eran Dilger’s “The Unavoidable Malware Myth: Why Apple Won’t Inherit Microsoft’s Malware Crown” (AppleInsider: 1 April 2008):

Thanks to its extensive use of battle-hardened Unix and open source software, Mac OS X also has always had security precautions in place that Windows lacked. It has also not shared the architectural weaknesses of Windows that have made that platform so easy to exploit and so difficult to clean up afterward, including:

  • the Windows Registry and the convoluted software installation mess related to it,
  • the Windows NT/2000/XP Interactive Services flaw opening up shatter attacks,
  • a wide open, legacy network architecture that left unnecessary, unsecured ports exposed by default,
  • poorly designed network sharing protocols that failed to account for adequate security measures,
  • poorly designed administrative messaging protocols that failed to account for adequate security,
  • poorly designed email clients that gave untrusted scripts access to spam one’s own contacts unwittingly,
  • an integrated web browser architecture that opened untrusted executables by design, and many others.

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Vista & Mac OS X security features

security, technology / /

From Prince McLean’s “Pwn2Own contest winner: Macs are safer than Windows” (AppleInsider: 26 March 2009):

Once it did arrive, Vista introduced sophisticated new measures to make it more difficult for malicious crackers to inject code.

One is support for the CPU’s NX bit, which allows a process to mark certain areas of memory as “Non-eXecutable” so the CPU will not run any code stored there. This is referred to as “executable space protection,” and helps to prevent malicious code from being surreptitiously loaded into a program’s data storage and subsequently executed to gain access to the same privileges as the program itself, an exploit known as a “buffer overflow attack.”

A second security practice of Vista is “address space layout randomization” or ASLR, which is used to load executables, and the system libraries, heap, and stack into a randomly assigned location within the address space, making it far more difficult for crackers to know where to find vulnerabilities they can attack, even if they know what the bugs are and how to exploit them.

[Charlie Miller, the security expert who won both this and last year’s CanSecWest Pwn2Own security contests,] told Tom’s Hardware “the NX bit is very powerful. When used properly, it ensures that user-supplied code cannot be executed in the process during exploitation. Researchers (and hackers) have struggled with ways around this protection. ASLR is also very tough to defeat. This is the way the process randomizes the location of code in a process. Between these two hurdles, no one knows how to execute arbitrary code in Firefox or IE 8 in Vista right now. For the record, Leopard has neither of these features, at least implemented effectively. In the exploit I won Pwn2Own with, I knew right where my shellcode was located and I knew it would execute on the heap for me.”

…

While Apple did implement some support for NX and ASLR in Mac OS X, Leopard retains dyld, (the dynamic loader responsible for loading all of the frameworks, dylibs, and bundles needed by a process) in the same known location, making it relatively trivial to bypass its ASLR. This is slated to change later this year in Snow Leopard.

With the much larger address space available to 64-bit binaries, Snow Leopard’s ASLR will make it possible to hide the location of loaded code like a needle in a haystack, thwarting the efforts of malicious attackers to maintain predictable targets for controlling the code and data loaded into memory. Without knowing what addresses to target, the “vast majority of these exploits will fail,” another security expert who has also won a high profile Mac cracking contest explained to AppleInsider.

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Russian music sites

art, business, technology / /

I just had a student email me asking about Russian music download sites. Here’s what I told him:

http://www.mp3sparks.com isn’t accepting payments. Dunno why. They haven’t for a long time, so they’re out of the picture, as far as I’m concerned.

I recommend looking at http://www.mp3fiesta.com now, as well as http://www.mp3sugar.com.

There’s a huge list of Russian music sites here: http://www.squidoo.com/russianmp3sites

Lots of good info there.

Oh, and don’t forget the Amazon MP3 store. It’s actually nice – cheaper than Apple, but not as cheap as the Russians!

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Portable music turns life into cinema

art, business, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Farhad Manjoo’s “iPod: I love you, you’re perfect, now change” (Salon: 23 October 2006):

Levy writes that when this happens, the music becomes a “soundtrack” for the scenery, which is a good way to put it. The iPod turns ordinary life — riding the bus, waiting in line at the post office, staring at a spreadsheet for 12 hours a day — into cinema. Levy describes the work of sociologist Michael Bull, who, when studying the habits of fans of the iPod’s great ancestor the Sony Walkman, found that people liked to think of themselves “as imaginary movie stars” playing out scenes dictated by the music in their ears. One subject who listened to music from spaghetti westerns said that the Walkman turned him into a “verbal bounty hunter” bent on firing “short cool blasts of verbal abuse” at his co-workers. The science fiction writer William Gibson once described the Walkman as having done “more to change human perception than any virtual reality gadget. I can’t remember any technological experience that was quite so wonderful as being able to take music and move it through landscape and architecture.” The iPod, with its greater capacity, alters perception even more profoundly; when the right song comes on, the world actually feels different.

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Great, wonderfully-designed consumer products

business, cool stuff, technology / /

From Farhad Manjoo’s “iPod: I love you, you’re perfect, now change” (Salon: 23 October 2006):

There are very few consumer products about which you’d want to read a whole book — the Google search engine, the first Mac, the Sony Walkman, the VW Beetle. Levy proves that the iPod, which turns five years old today, belongs to that club.

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