Ursecta

DoS your kids

Saw this “How old will you get?” site, in Swedish, linked from a friend’s Facebook page (or an ad, can’t really make it out, but that’s the nature of FB, right?):

Stupid site, don’t go there. But if you do go there, they ask you to register. So you don’t, but click “Starta testet” instead. Then they ask you for your email address, so you invent a dummy address, of course. Then they ask you for your personal number (before you Americans freak out, it’s not as secret as a social security number, but still, I wouldn’t give it to them), so you invent one. You’ve got a one in ten chance of making it a valid number, since only one digit is used as a check digit.

Anyway, after three failed tries, you get this:

581

Great! Love it. Which inspired me to think we could use this mechanism to stop other members of our little NAT tribe, since we’re all behind the same public IP, to get to that stupid site so our kids could give away email adresses and personal numbers to dubious people. Instead of blacklisting their domains in the router, let’s lock out our public IP by random login trials.

Not that I see what advantage the method has technically, but it’s just so cool turning their own tools against them.

So much knowledge in such a small box

I was doing the rounds at a nursing home out in the sticks the other day, and came to an old (all of them were old) woman with a urinary catheter and bag. Her problem, or rather her worry, was that the bag turned violet from the urine sometimes, but only the last week. The urine itself didn’t change color, only the plastic of the bag.

I already knew that some laxatives can cause the urine itself to turn violet if it’s alkaline, and I’ve heard of this phenomenon of the plastic becoming discolored, but as far as I remembered, it wasn’t alarming, so I just made the regular soothing doctor noises. But the nurse persisted, said she’d heard it could indicate urinary tract infections. iphone

So I pulled out my iPhone, opened Safari, and googled “violet urine bag” and lo and behold, there’s an article about the “Violet urine bag syndrome” from Osaka University, explaining how this happens in some urinary tract infections. Other similar articles taught me which bacteria are usually involved and when to look out for it.

I happily explained this to the nurse and told her she was right and I was wrong. Then the patient said to the nurse: “Amazing how they can get so much knowledge into such a small package” and they both looked with wonder and amazement at my iPhone. I was on the verge of explaining it wasn’t in the phone but on the ‘net, but then I thought: what’s the difference, really? Isn’t that just a technical detail? So I just nodded and said “yes, indeed”.

Protected media truly stink

I’m so fed up with protected media of all kinds making me spend time doing shit that I shouldn’t have to do. This is what I encountered today for the hundredth time (less, but it feels so):

Zinio ReaderScreenSnapz002

Every time this happens, you have to uninstall Zinio, delete its prefs, clear up a cache somewhere, then reinstall and reauthenticate it. Yes, I’ve got the routine documented, but man, this isn’t right. So I wrote them this letter, with absolutely no hope of them giving a damn:

Guys,

Really, time for you to get a grip. I’ve had MacWorld on Zinio for a couple of years now, and I’m growing so sick and tired of this 22-M error you never seem to fix, that I’m almost prepared to give up on subscribing to MacWorld anymore. You really need to fix this pronto. Show that you care, for once.

Every time anything at all changes on my machine, I have to manually go uninstall all of Zinio and reinstall it again, just to make it stop accusing me of being a thief. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to do this. I have it installed on two machines, a Pro and a MacBook, and if that is too much for you, well, it’s going to be goodbye at next renewal.

I’m copying MacWorld too, since I think they should be aware of why they’re losing this particular subscriber at least. I’d sincerely suggest they’ve got a better chance of keeping paying subscribers by distributing unprotected pdf’s, or at least pdf’s protected by somebody else than Zinio.

Sincerely,

— Martin

PS: I could have added “You’re worse than Microsoft”, but that would be overdoing it.

PPS: No, I haven’t read the MacWorld issue. I’ll try to find the energy to go through that crap later, so I can actually see it, but I can’t keep myself from wondering if it’s worth the trouble. Very bad sign.

Update Oct 11: after reinstalling on my desktop Mac Pro and redownloading the last issue of MacWorld, I got this dialog box instead:

576

I mean, seriously, reading a mag is supposed to be relaxing, but this??!

Update Oct 16: Got another message from Zinio support telling me to do the exact same thing their previous message told me to do. That is, download the uninstaller, uninstall, download the installer, install, authenticate, hope for best, try. Since they sent that message twice, I figured I could repeat the procedure just for kicks, and sure enough, this time it worked. Um, no, actually not. I discovered that the issue file I redownloaded from Zinio according to the instructions I got the last time was corrupt, with a bad filename and extension. In other words, when Zinio told me “you do not have rights to this publication on this computer” it actually meant “this file is corrupt”. Would you have guessed? So I copied the file I had on my MacBook to the Mac Pro, and then it worked. Except it took another hour or so until I could read the MacWorld issue due to this problem:

580

In other words, if the Zinio server is down anytime the reader wants to verify your status, which is the first time you open it and whenever it feels unsure of itself, you’re out of luck yet again.

Right, now I can finally read the November issue of MacWorld on my portable and my desktop. Am I happy? Not really. As I already said, reading a mag is supposed to be relaxing. I’m prepared to pay for convenience. But all I’m getting for my money is aggravation. I’m not going to extend my subscription anymore, hoping instead that the so far mythical Apple iTablet will revolutionize this market and bring something much more useful and pleasant. But if it doesn’t, I fear the end is near for DRM’ed online publications.

Zombies…

Like this company X I know, in the vertical application business. Same as company Y and Z I also know in the vertical application business, all of them doing healthcare applications like record systems, pathology systems, etc. Doesn’t matter exactly what they do or who they are, they are all representative of how that entire segment is looking and behaving right now. So when I describe one of them, I describe them all.

Right off the bat, I have to confess that my sudden blinding flashes of the obvious are brought on by an overdose of Seth Godin’s books. I’m on my fifth right now, “Survival is not enough“, with the subtitle “Shift happens“, and I’ve got six more to go. I simply bought all of them, as far as I know. (Seth, shouldn’t you provide for subscriptions?)

Everything he says, I already knew, but I didn’t know I knew until he told me. That’s the best kind of book, the one that digs out something that’s been lurking inside your mind and exposes it to the air. It’s also the easiest kind of book to read for me, since I need no convincing. It comes from me, inside myself, so it must be true (I’m almost serious).

So what about these zombies, what are they doing wrong? Well, they’re challenged, to put it mildly. All of them seem to have sales teams on crack, selling anything to anyone, if it exists or not. Then they’ve got backlogs they can’t handle, increasingly irate customers (some of them trailing lawyers and stuff), development languages and IDEs that are orphaned since years. They try one new development methodology after another, decide they have no time to implement them and abandon them again, after spending monumental amounts of money and time on stuff they never give a chance to deliver a return. They get involved, but they don’t commit (insert favorite farm animal references here).

Once they start losing orders, they abandon even more of the changes they tried out and go back to their old ways, just like a wounded animal curling up in the bushes, hoping the predators will pass them by. The worse everything gets, the more these people grab hold of methods and means that used to work so many years ago, but evidently don’t work anymore. They know it won’t work, but they can’t let go. Amazing.

Look, there’s one message here, that seems not to penetrate, and that is: if your old methods don’t work, change. The worse it gets, the more reason you have to change. The sooner you change, the more capital and time you have to bridge the change and pick up on the other side of the divide. If you wait until there is nothing left, there is, um, nothing left.

But it’s pointless. They will not uncurl and come out from under that bush. Poor bastards.

Dry cleaning and the web

I went to have my suit (yes, I do have one) dry cleaned. Looked up dry cleaners in Uppsala, found one that even had a web site. On the web site I found their address, used my GPS to go there, walked around the block with my iPhone until I very precisely located the exact spot where it should be. Except it wasn’t. Walked around the block a few more times, since the maps in the iPhone aren’t all that accurate in positioning the user, so I thought that was the problem. Nope, no dry cleaners around.

Finally, I went into a nearby store and asked if they knew where the dry cleaners were, and they pointed me to the other side of the block on another street. And there I found the place.

I pointed out to the guy that they ought to update their homepage. He told me they couldn’t. The guy that did the homepage died on them three years back and he had all the passwords, and as I understood it, the ownership of the site and the domain. So they’re stuck. They moved the store to a new location two years back, but couldn’t get at the website source. (Yes, I also find it strange that the site stays up, do they pay for it somehow? If so why? I didn’t ask.) A lot of customers walk around the wrong block looking for them and then give up. They had a notice up at the old location for a while, but the new store owners made them take it down.

The moral of the story: don’t ever let your site be set up by somebody else without getting ownership of the domain and the accounts and all relevant passwords. Especially not if they plan on dying just like that. This store is much worse off having a website than if they’d never had one. If they had no website, customers could only find them through the yellow pages, and those you can always update.

.NET considered harmful

A friend of mine just told me about what an MS evangelist said at a symposium on multicore (paraphrased), after getting the question:

“Did MS consider that cache awareness for programmers in multicore development?”

…and he answered:

“The average developer is not capable of handling that kind of level of detail. … Most developers are that ignorant. Welcome to the real world.”

To me, this explains a lot. It explains why .NET looks like it does, and to clarify what I mean by that, let me simply copy in extracts from what I had to say about it in a private forum just weeks ago. In what follows, the italics are brief extracts of comments from others. The rest is my own text. It’s not always in a totally logical order and it starts out in midflight, but it’s a synthesis of a longish thread on a security related forum.

Continue reading “.NET considered harmful”

App store or Dashcode?

Over the last week or so, I’ve spent a lot of time with the WDC 2009 sessions, and Dashcode, at least in its upcoming 3.0 version, seems to be amazingly capable. The results are almost indistinguishable from SDK apps (for want of a better label). And, they don’t go through the app store. And, they download to the phone and can run offline as well, including a local database.

This is probably what Apple hinted at when the iPhone 1.0 was introduced, except nobody would believe it was a useful way of creating apps. Neither did I back then, but now I do. Interestingly, the hassles with the iTunes policy (see previous blog entry) also pushes me in that direction. Maybe they did it on purpose? Read a much sharper and more enjoyable version of the same idea at Factory Joe.

Anything but games are illegal?

I’m having this most surrealistic dialog with a very agreeable iTunes support person, about invoicing. The thing is I bought a few apps from the iTunes app store, among which Omni Focus for the iPhone, but the invoice (or “receipt”) I got from Apple doesn’t mention sales tax at all. Just the net amount in Swedish crowns. It is, however, correctly addressed to my company.

As practically anyone realizes, this is super weird and means I can’t recover the sales tax when I enter this document into my accounting. So I wrote to iTunes support and asked for a correct invoice. The ensuing conversation follows (I took out the name of the iTunes representative).

Continue reading “Anything but games are illegal?”

Damn, I’m so proud of myself

This morning I started developing for the iPhone (it arrived two days ago, what took me so long?). After watching a load of presentations from WWDC 2009 (you have to pay for that, but boy is it worth it), I got really curious about Dashcode. This environment lets you develop web applications and it looked really impressive. So I took half an hour to implement a webapp based RSS reader. Then I spent a couple of hours trying to find out why it didn’t work. I still don’t know, but I think it’s due to crappy 3G performance in my living room. Works fine outside.

If you’ve got an iPhone, try it out for yourself. Once you’ve got it loaded in Safari, tap the plus sign down below and save it to the home screen. Next time you start it from the home screen as if it was a real app, it will look like a real app, without any Safari chrome to give it away. You’ll also notice that the icon is totally crap, just a grey rectangle. But what do you expect from a developer that only this morning started up the IDE for the first time?

If you open up this app in Safari on the desktop, that works as well, but looks like just any old web page, but grayer. In Firefox it fails. In Explorer… who cares?

The link is:

http://ursecta.com/UrsectaReader/

The real iPhone conspiracy

So I’ve used a Mac for a while and I’m just starting on iPhone development and a blinding flash of the almost-obvious strikes me. This is not the Blackberry killer or the Palm killer, it’s the long-fuse Microsoft killer.

Remember the monkey dance? Ballmer yelling “Developers, developers, developers!”, while jumping around like a neurally defective and sweating profusely (one could be excused for suspecting some cholinergic poison, but he lived through it, so that is not the answer). Right. I mean, he’s right. Developers is what makes or breaks a platform, but now he’s losing them, so he really has no reason to celebrate.

When Apple designed the iPhone, they could have created a special development system and language for it, but even though it may have been easier, they didn’t. They chose to tweak the development environment for OSX to include the iPhone, and by necessity, also putting OSX on the iPhone. The result of this is that if you want to develop for the iPhone, you have to get a Mac (strike 1), learn OSX (strike 2), learn Objective-C (strike 3), learn Cocoa (strike 4), and by then you’re so deeply immersed in the Mac environment that you won’t find your way out again. Since you can run your Windows stuff, including Visual Studio, just fine under Parallels or Fusion, you don’t need that Dell or HP machine for anything anymore, and you’re not sorry to see them go. In other words, you’ve got a developer that clearly isn’t going to like going back to .NET development again. I mean, once you’ve used these two environments (Xcode/Cocoa/Objective-C vs .NET/Visual Studio) it’s practically impossible to enjoy .NET anymore. It’s so far behind and so very clunky in comparison it’s almost a joke.

So, every developer you task with iPhone development is almost certainly lost from the .NET camp forever. This I can’t prove, but I’m convinced of it. But now is the question: who are these developers? Do they already develop for the Mac or are they from the “other” side? Again, by the seat of my pants, I’m convinced that a very large and increasing proportion come from large enterprise .NET development organisations that need to add a client for their large systems on the iPhone. See where this is going?

It’s only just begun.

Update: I suddenly realized that I fused two unrelated events together in my mind. Steve Ballmer did the monkey dance and yelled “Developers, developers…!” at two different, equally traumatizing, occasions. I’m not sure that’s any better, though. It’s all very disturbing.