In the App Store,
the Apple App Store,
the Lion ships tonight.
(I actually don’t care that much. I’m planning to wait on Lion.1 at least, maybe Lion.2. But Lawrence and I were chatting earlier today and that riff came to me; it’s the kind of thing you only get to use maybe once in a lifetime.)
(This is kind of interesting. Especially for $5.99. I haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet, but I have downloaded it: this BBC documentary sounds like it could be worthwhile. Download link.)
That’s Daring Fireball on the Apple campus plans, quoting Daniel Burnham.
Bear with me, please, as it is about to get geeky in here.
Here’s an image of the proposed Apple campus, hotlinked from TechCrunch:
This is the best regular image I could find of the General Atomics campus in San Diego:
Slightly better overhead shot:
I think there’s at least a superficial similarity. But so what, you ask? Well, General Atomics was the company that brought us Project Orion.
Remember Project Orion? If you don’t, there’s a pretty good book on the subject: Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship
“Make no little plans”, indeed. Can you imagine Apple building their campus on top of a giant metal plate, and then one day when the trans-humanist revolution comes, launching the entire site and all the employees into orbit? Of course, there’s minor details to work out in advance, but isn’t this the kind of plan that stirs the blood?
Is this what Jobs has in mind? Probably not, but a boy can dream, can’t he?
It has been a somewhat slow holiday weekend, and I’ve been spending a good-sized chunk of it messing with stuff.
I wanted to upgrade my existing wireless router to something that had dual-band (2.4GHz/5GHz) support, and would also run the dd-wrt firmware. So, thanks to the great Jeff Atwood, I went ahead and ordered a Netgear WNDR3700
I like dd-wrt in principle, and I think if you’re willing to put up with it, the firmware offers a very rich feature set. But the documentation could use a lot of work. I bricked the router several times (though I was able to recover it): the instructions on this page work just fine for flashing the factory_NA.img file, but the router would lock up and require a tftp reflash as soon as I tried to flash any other version.
Once I got past that, it took a little more skull sweat (though not quite as much) to get my Maxtor EasyShare NAS working as a CIFS device, and to get a static IP assigned to it. (The dd-wrt docs on assigning a static IP even admit that the assignment process is buggy.)
A little more skull sweat after that and I was able to get the 1 TB drive I’d attached to the USB port on the router mounted using Samba and accessible from both the MacBook and Project e. So now I have about 1.3 TB of network accessible storage, which is nice. Transmit power seems reasonable: I can get a signal on my Evo well out into the parking lot of my complex. (I haven’t tried tweaking the transmit power or other settings for the radios in the router, which is one of the nice things dd-wrt lets you do.) I also like being able to put in three DNS servers; again, acting on a Jeff Atwood suggestion, I downloaded and ran namebench, and added a tertiary name server based on its recommendations.
Ah, but there’s a problem. I want to run a closed network using the 5 GHz radio only (for maximum speed) and an open network using the 2.4 GHz radio (isolated from the main network). It turns out that, while the netbook does support wireless N, the adapter only runs on the 2.4 GHz frequency. So if I want to get top speed on the netbook, I need to get a USB wireless N adapter that supports 5 GHz and is supported under Ubuntu. (I don’t want to go through the whole ndiswrapper thing.) And I haven’t been able to find that yet…
Oh, yeah: I also upgraded Microsoft Office to the 2011 version: prior to all of this, I upgraded the MacBook to 10.6.7, and Office 2011 seems to run much better under 10.6 than the Office 2004 I was using. And I can get rid of the file conversion utility.
Still on my list of things to do before school starts up again, besides updating the Saturday Dining Conspiracy pages:
There’s travel in there as well. And somewhere, Mike the Musicologist is snickering at me…
“What the f**k does that mean?”
–John Gruber @ Daring Fireball
John:
It’s okay. Everyone has that reaction when reading Rob Enderle. Why don’t you sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and read something soothing, like the works of H.L. Mencken?
(Speaking of taking a stress pill, I would not be upset to find one of these in my stocking on Christmas morning.)
(Speaking of the works of H.L. Mencken, I am reminded that I need to add Prejudices: The Complete Series
My regular readers (and my irregular readers, too; come to think of it, “Whipped Cream Irregulars” would be a good name for a band) may have figured out by now that I’ve spent much of the past week on the road. Specifically, I was in Tucson for the annual convention of the Smith and Wesson Collectors Association. (You might have been able to guess that I also made a brief trip to the Phoenix/Scottsdale area so I could visit Taliesin West.)
I’m not going to talk much about what went on at that convention here, since it is a closed private convention, and I’m not comfortable discussing the organization’s affairs on a public blog. (Jay G. and the rest of the Vicious Circle gang might be amused to know that there was an actual S&W police bike, manufactured in Springfield, MA and complete with lights and siren, on display at the convention. I didn’t get a chance to take a photo.) I will say I had a great time at the convention, and in Tucson in general. Sadly, I didn’t have time to hit any used bookstores or gun stores in the area, but maybe next time.
This is the first extended road trip I’ve taken since last year’s DEFCON, so I thought it might be interesting to do some notes about what worked and didn’t work on this trip.
We watch very little television these days, to the point where we haven’t even hooked up our converter boxes to our analog television yet.
What TV we do watch (Cops, America’s Most Wanted, the occasional episode of Nova or the American Experience during the three months out of the year our local PBS affiliate isn’t begging for money: and we have recently found that The Good Guys kicks over our giggle-box), we watch on the MacBook using an Elgato EyeTV Hybrid and Elgato’s EyeTV software. The EyeTV software gives us very TIVO-like features, as well as the ability to export and even burn recordings to DVD (as well as skipping commercials). Indeed, we are considering an upgrade to a new television (now that prices have come down considerably) and hanging a Mac Mini off the new TV as a fake TIVO.
The point of this tale is that we were highly entertained by an email from Elgato this morning: the company has released a version of EyeTV with a “Vuvuzela Filter”. Not that this matters much to us; we consider soccer to be even worse than baseball, but the idea brought a rare early morning smile to our face.
Lawrence pointed me to this article over at /dev/why!?! about possible reasons why Apple doesn’t want to support Flash on the iPhone.
Meanwhile, Sebastian has a good post up on the NRA’s crappy Flash-heavy website.
And Other Brian sent me a link to this Downfall parody.
The Hindu Love Gods album is now available from iTunes. I believe exactly two of my readers will find this significant.
Also, thanks to a tip from Caleb (yes, the Caleb of tactical coffee fame) on Tam’s site, I’m enjoying Kompressor’s World Domination
The New Jersey Nets are on a pace to win a grand total of six games this season. The NBA record for futility is the 1972-1973 Philadelphia 76ers, who went 9-73. Could the Nets beat the record? The NYT speculates.
I note this only because it will fill Lawrence’s heart with delight: Frank Gehry has withdrawn from the project to design a Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem.
Saturday’s Statesman has a longish article recapping the Triton Financial story, highlighting the firm’s ties to the Mormon church.
Church members and others describe the concentration of Triton executives and investors from the Mormon church as a possible example of “affinity fraud,” in which people looking for money often go first to those they know, either personally or through social organizations.
A $1,000 iPhone app that’s not I Am Rich.
Non story of the day: U.S. Military Weapons Inscribed With Secret ‘Jesus’ Bible Codes.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned this, so; I’m back in school one night a week (and not even meeting every night on the schedule). So blogging is either going to be light or heavy as I avoid schoolwork.
School has wrapped up for the semester, at least for me. (Yes, I’m aware it is mid-October. Yes, I’m aware normal people are dealing with mid-terms. What can I say; that’s the way the St. Ed’s New College schedule worked out this time around.)
Now that I’ve got some free time, I can engage in some useful projects, like more Project e work (I’ve got a long multi-part post in the works that I hope to finish soon), updating the SDC pages, and perhaps some outside study.
I’ve written here before about the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative, and I decided this would be as good a time as any to start working through 6.00, “Introduction to Computer Science and Programming“. As I was reviewing the various readings, a thought came to me.
“Hey,” I said to myself, “wouldn’t it be nifty to blog this as you’re taking it?”
“That’s a definition of ‘nifty’ I was previously unaware of,” I responded.
“It’d give you some motivation,” I said.
“Why am I talking to myself?” I responded.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Have you considered medication?”
Anyway, my need for psychotropic medications aside, this seems like a good idea, if only to give my loyal readers something to laugh at. So…
Getting Started: Python and IDLE.
My code for problem set 1. (This has been tested on Project e with Python 2.6.2, on the MacBook with Python 2.5, and on the Nokia with Python 2.5.2. I haven’t tested it on my work machine yet.)
Comments on my code or coding style are welcome; as a matter of fact, they are downright encouraged.
First of all, if any of my friends (or even blog readers who are not friends) are considering purchasing Snow Leopard from Amazon, here’s the link
To keep this from being a 100% “Buy Amazon! Give me money!” entry, I want to mention a web log that’s new to me; by way of Lawrence, we have Lovely Listing. One entry that he found particularly striking was the velour people. Lawrence also included this link, but I’m not sure where he found it on Lovely Listing.
When he mentioned the names Arakawa and Gins, I thought they sounded somewhat familiar. Indeed, they were; it turns out Arakawa and Gins were two of Bernie Madoff’s clients. (That second link is by way of Nancy Nall, who has some pungent things to say on the subject.)
I like DEFCON. I like Dark Tangent personally. I like Joe Grand, the guy who has designed the DEFCON badges for the past few years.
But, guys, it looks really bad when, for the second year in a row, you run out of badges early on Thursday and have to issue temporary badges until more real ones get to the con Friday morning. You don’t even have the Olympics to blame this year. This is especially frustrating now that badge hacking is an official event/contest.
DEFCON talks I will not be attending:
“Hacking UFOlogy 102: The Implications of UFOs for Life, the Universe, and Everything.”
“Two years ago at Def Con 15, Richard [Thieme] presented Hacking UFOlogy. He supported his contention that (1) UFOs are real and (2) the data to support that statement is voluminous with numerous references and links…”
DEFCON talks I plan to attend:
“Is your iPhone Pwned”, Mahaffrey, Hering, and Lineberry. (This may be tough to get into, but it is scheduled against Dark Tangent’s intro and Joe Grand’s discussion of the badge, so we’ll see.)
“Hacking with the iPod Touch”, Willhelm
“That Awesome Time I Was Sued For Two Billion Dollars”, Scott
“Three Point Oh”, Long. (For the speaker’s reputation; I’ve heard Johnny Long speak before, and he’s someone I’d like to know better.)
“Something About Network Security”, Kaminsky. (Again, for the speaker’s reputation; Kaminsky is to TCP/IP what Musashi was to the sword.)
“Hacker vs. Disasters Large & Small”, RenderMan and Schearer
“Personal Survival Preparedness”, Dunker and Dunker
“Picking Electronic Locks Using TCP Sequence Prediction”, Lawshae
“Sniff Keystrokes With Lasers/Voltmeters”, Barisani and Bianco
“Bluetooth, Smells Like Chicken”, Spill, Ossmann, and Steward. (It looks like they’re going to talk about using software-defined radio to sniff Bluetooth, techniques for breaking the pseudo-random hopping sequence, and apparently some stuff that can be done with sub-$10 off-the-shelf hardware.)
“RAID Recovery: Recover Your PORN By Sight and Sound”, Moulton
“USB Attacks”, Vega
“Cracking 400,000 Passwords, Or How To Explain to Your Roomate why the Power Bill Is a Little High”, Weir and Aggarwal
I missed the panels on “Hacking With GNURadio” and “Hacking the Apple TV and Where your Forensic Data Lives”. Perhaps next year I need to arrive on Wednesday. If there is a next year.