iPhone is all about the experience. The style. That’s Apple in a nutshell. It’s not always about features. It is nice to have choices. I’m glad there is a choice. For me, it’s iPhone 4 because I’m a sucker for that experience and style. It’s beautiful and it works well. I don’t care to run MySQL (in the background) on my mobile device. I just want the best possible phone/information device experience. For my money that’s iPhone. It’s like comparing a Corvette ZR1 with a Ferarri. The Vette is cheaper AND faster around the track, but the Ferrari is a Ferrari…

My game is only 3 bucks. Yet, people are out making an effort to pirate it. What’s funny is that this doesn’t bother me in the least. It kind of makes me happy.

As a kid, “Juarez” was a very close friend of mine. I started out in about 1986 with an Atari ST and a 1200bps modem and I quickly set out to find free software. At 12 I had no income and  a huge desire to collect and try as much software as possible. I spent countless hours finding warez BBSs that carried Atari ST stuff. And countless more getting access, trading software, and playing with my pirated software booty! I later ran several semi-popular warez BBSs including Burning Chrome ][ (801), The Turing Registry (714), and The Black Sun (714).

As I pirated I always said I wouldn’t care if I was on the other end. If I was the software developer and kids (or slovenly adults) were stealing from me, I’d be fine with it. I’m glad to say now that I’m on the other side, I don’t care. People are stealing from me. Getting my game for free and I don’t care.

Why? Because there will always be pirates and they actually help more than they hurt. A pirate spends an inordinate amount of time pirating. It’s sport. It’s clearly not about the $3 my game costs. But these pirates are enthusiasts as well. They want to play EVERY game, even if only once. They recommend games to people who don’t pirate, increasing your paying customers. It’s the long tail. Kids on the bleeding edge don’t pay. They even offer to help long tailers not pay. But in the end, people with more money than time (your actual customer) will pay.

Today, while I still maintain the skills to easily pirate iPhone games, I never do. It’s not worth it to me. I’m busy and have more money than time. It’s not that I can’t pirate, or that I am scared to pirate, I just don’t want the hassle. Pirating software is ALWAYS a hassle even for the most accomplished pirate. Most pirates eventually grow out of it and start paying for things they like either to earnestly support the artist/creator or simply to avoid the hassle.

This is why I hate invasive copy protection. It does nothing to stop the real pirates and it usually inconveniences the actual paying customer. The pirates are not your customer. They are your “social marketing” team.

In almost 2 weeks of heavy use I’d never seen a wifi problem with my iPad and didn’t even know one existed until I synced it with iTunes. BEWARE. Here’s the deets:

When I synced the iPad, iTunes starts to install every single app I’ve ever purchased/installed on my iPhone. This includes all of the apps I’ve deleted from my iphone. So I interrupt it and tell iTunes not to sync apps. iTunes then says it must remove ALL of the apps from my iPad. ALL. This is done as a retarded DRM measure and is one of the top reasons why I hate iTunes. This does nothing to prevent piracy but instead punishes the loyal paying customer, me.

Anyone who wants to pirate any app in the App Store and install it for FREE can simply jailbreak their device, go to http://thepiratebay.com and download and install every damned paid app in the app store. This is easy and is perpetrated constantly by those so inclined. Apple is behaving like every other FAILED organization who doesn’t understand security. In an attempt to mitigate (loss) risk they punish the innocent while doing nothing to stop the actual threat. For other similar examples see PC Game DRM or anything the TSA has ever done.

1. I don’t want most iphone apps on my iPad
2. I definerly don’t want apps I’ve deleted from my iPhone on my iPad or my iPhone.
3. I DO want access to apps I have purchased for my iPhone on my iPad but I will install them through the app store without iTunes, thank you.
4. I DO NOT want to hav to select from the 500+ apps, which ones to sync.
5. All I wanted really was for iTunes not the fuck with my apps at all. Just install the goddamned pictures!!!

Once I synced and let iTunes remove all of my apps, the iPad had the wifi bug. It still has it.

Apple has acknowledged a wifi problem with iPads. The symtoms vary but the iPad either drops the wifi connection, drops and forgets the password, or drops during lock/hibernate. Mine is doing the last and I suppose least irritating of these. Upon lock (and sitting for multiple minutes) it drops the wifi connection and must be manually reconnected in settings.

Nothing changed on my infrastructure. The iPad immedialty started losing wifi on sleep/lock after syncing. All other devices, including macs and iphones maintain a consistent wifi connection. This is not an issue with my router (WRT54G) this is an issue with the iPad firmware. This issue DID NOT appear until after iTunes molested my iPad.

I’ve been trying several things to get it back to normal. So far nothing has worked. I’ll post something if I fix it.

———–
FIXED!!!
———–

Changing iPad brightness fixed the problem. As indicated In the apple support doc referenced above. I still hate iTunes.

The tablet has finally arrived after all these years. How many years? In 1992 I worked for a company that was building tablets for the military. 18 years ago I had one of these systems in my bedroom. The company was GRiD Systems and they had working production tablet computers based on the i486/33 I believe. They ran a tablet version of Windows 3.1. They were neat for the time but still sucked. This time it’s different.

Yes yes… the iPad is just a big iPhone. Now that I have one, I use the iPhone a lot less in the house. But…. I didn’t want to read books on my iPhone. It’s awesome as a pocket sized device but there are things which, simply due to size  it’s not well suited for.

Long story short, I believe this will take over for 80% of what we currently use desktops and laptops for. Plus it adds new applications and new opportunities for interaction and creativity that open up entirely new use cases.

PROS:

• A new class of device that makes existing applications more enjoyable and opens up entirely new use cases.
• Beautiful and sexy as we expect from Apple.
• Battery Life is unbelievable. I’ve had it for 3 days using it a lot and it’s still running on the charge that it came with OUT OF THE BOX!
• Books are great. Lot’s of free books in the iBook store from the Gutenberg Project. Currently reading Sherlock Holmes.

CONS

• HEAVY. I’d gladly trade half the battery life for half the weight.
• Awkward to hold, mainly because it’s heavy.
• You’ll want iPad specific apps cause they are way cooler. So you will be buying more, possibly duplicate apps that are also more expensive.

iTunes sucks. It has always sucked. It sucks even more now that I have to use it regularly in order to use my iPhone and iPad. It has to be updated at least twice a month. It’s cumbersome and slow even on a fast machine. It’s antiquated. I hate it very much and always have. I used to bypass it and refuse to use it on my early ipods but you’ve been pushing it more and more. Connecting everything to it. Please stop.

Also, resource forks on network drives SUCKS as well.

Thanks,

-Shon

Here’s the simple script:

cat commands | while read LINE
do say "$LINE" -o "$LINE.aiff"
done

Of course if you google “wordpress database connection error” or any iteration of that you get a bunch of fools who don’t know how to config their blog and answers related to that. This wasn’t my problem. I knew it could connect because replacing the data with an old copy of the db via “mysql -p db <dbbackup brought it all back fine. Problem was I didn’t have a recent backup… despite my recent post on backing up databases . This blog fell into the lower priority que and therefore didn’t get scripted for backup on the new box.

ANYWAY the point is for those folks who may be getting a DB connection error from wordpress and know it’s not a DB connection problem, I recommend using PHPmyAdmin to export your posts and/or comments table from the current (corrupt) DB and importing them to a known good copy of the DB. You can do this on a table by table basis to get your good and current data into the structure of an old (but non-corrupt) copy of the DB. I just did this and now the blog is back. Of course you’d want to check the data first and make sure it’s there/good.

OS X does this and it sucks. During the creation of a file on a non-HFS+ filesystem the mac leaves this garbage. When other macs look at the drive they don’t display these files. When other computers (Windows) look at the drive they see all of this “dust” and it’s confusing because the garbage has the same filename as the real file prepended with “._”.

The .ds_store files are easy to get rid of. Fire up terminal on the mac and enter defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

The “resource forks” or _. or _.AppleDouble files are harder to get rid of and were the larger problem for me. I couldn’t find a way to tell the mac to stop this bad behavior. Nothing on the web for a defaults/plist solution like the .ds_store fix. Instead I’m running a cron job on the server to remove these. This is an inelegant solution but it works for me: find /your/directory/path -name ._* -exec rm '{}' ';'

Apple should really fix this if it wants to be accepted by the enterprise.

First let me say that I will be so happy when Microsoft finally flutters in to irrelevance. I use a Mac and have since OS X got decent. Webdav works great on the mac. “It just works…” just like the Mac commercials say.

However, some of the people that work at Wildcog use Windows. So like many, I beat my head against a wall trying to get Vista X64 and Windows 7 X64 to work with Webdav. If you’re running 32bit Windows 7 or Vista just get NetDrive and be done with it. It works like a champ.

For 64 Bit folks NetDrive doesn’t work. But I have good news, believe it or not Windows 7 actually can connect to Webdav. I have it working and will show you how in a sec. It’s not perfect but it does work through the Windows Explorer (and office apps) using nothing more than the built-in support (if you can call it that) in Windows.

My setup:

Webdav Server = Apache2 with Mod Dav on Debian (lenny).

Clients = Random Windows 7 machines (much to my chagrin).

The problem:

My main issue was that the windows box would throw the error “The folder you entered does not appear to be valid” when I tried any of the various methods of connecting or mapping the drive to the webdav resource.

The Fix:

• Make sure  the WebClient Service is running and set to run automatically.
• Configure your webdav server to use Digest Authentication. Windows 7 WILL NOT connect to webdav servers using Basic Authentication.
• Verify that your webdav server with AuthDigest is good by using a known-good OS/Client such as Linux or a Mac.
• On the windows machine go to Explorer\Computer and right click in empty space. Then select “Add a network location”. Now enter your normal webdav URL such as http://your.drive.com/yourfiles

That should be it. It’s worked for me on several machines now. Once you add the “network location” you can map drives to the network location or to the url (it suddenly works) and do other operations normally. You can also use the “net use” command in the shell which may have more interesting options for you.

Some folks have asked for my Apache config. Here’s the relevant bit:

ServerAdmin webmaster@yourdomain.com
ServerName webdav.yourdomain.com

DocumentRoot /www/somethingSecure

Options Indexes MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all

Problems and issues:

So far this works ‘ok’ for me. A reboot seems to hose this setup. Although the “network location” still exists it doesn’t work. I haven’t had sufficient time to play with it and work out the kinds. There’s the /savecred and /persistent switches on the “net use” command that may be useful here.

• A trailing slash “/” makes a difference on connecting via webdav. So “http://webdav.yourserver.com” is not the same as “http://webdav.yourserver.com/”. Try it both ways if you’re having trouble.
• The Apache Authentication Digest documentation example says to use the “AuthDigestFile” directive to point to your password file. This does not work on Debain Lenny / Apache 2. You must use “AuthUserFile” as noted in the above example.

Other Possibilities:

In the event that you can’t change your authentication type you can try going the other way with a registry hack to allow basic authentication. This is for Vista. It may not work for 7. I have not tried it. Got it from here:

To work around this behavior, enable Basic authentication on the client computer. To do this, add the BasicAuthLevel registry entry to the following registry subkey, and then set the entry to a value of 2 or more:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WebClient\Parameters
To enable Basic authentication on the client computer, follow these steps:
Click Start , type regedit in the Start Search box, and then click regedit.exe in the Programs list.
Locate and then click the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WebClient\Parameters
On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
Type BasicAuthLevel, and then press ENTER.
On the Edit menu, click Modify.
In the Value data box, type 2, and then click OK.

Note The mapping is as follows:
0 - Basic authentication disabled
1 - Basic authentication enabled for SSL shares only
2 or greater - Basic authentication enabled for SSL shares and for non-SSL shares
Exit Registry Editor, and then restart the computer.

MS obviously hates webdav. It’s a big threat to them. And for a long time they’ve been abusing users in order to lock them in rather than focusing on making great products that people want to use. Other examples are:

• Hotmail not allowing you to forward mail to a non-MS-owned mail service
• Bing being the only search available in IE
• Breaking compatibility with millions of smb devices in the name of security

For the record, digest based auth is better. And it’s good that they’re pushing a more secure solution. But it’s also clear that they just want to make it hard to use webdav. They post no information about the problem. If M$ made money on webdav you can bet your ass it would work or there would at least be a message saying “windows prevented you from connecting to this insecure server ” but no.

Webdav is great. It doesn’t rely on creaky layer two protocols like the antique M$ smb / lanman crap.

Hope this helps. It worked for me.

This works great for me. I have a small 80m (uncompressed) database that I need to make nightly backups of. It may not for you. The idea here is to use gmail as a free cloud based backup solution. If you have  a multi-terrabyte database I hope you have enough money to pay for a fancy solution.

As I said, my DB is about 80M uncompressed or just over 25M compressed. Just over the gmail attachment limit for a single message. So to get the job done I need to dump the DB, compress it, and split the files in to < 25m chucks, then encode and mail to my gmail backup account.

I toyed around with “mpack” as a one command solution for splitting, encoding, and emailing the files but ran into problems when I tried to reassemble the file. mpack works great but when it splits and emails the files, the first file has MIME header info to make it appear as an attachment. The second or subsequent files are emailed as plain inline (encoded) text. I know mpack is used to send huge amounts of data to binary newsgroups but in my 15 minutes of screwing with it, I could not get it to add a MIME header to each part (email) of the file. “munpack” is supposed to read the mpacked files and do this for you but it could not work with the files that I produced. The mpack output was unacceptable as it required way to much by-hand processing to re-assemble the gzip. I still used mpack to email the files but i use “split” to break them up before mailing.

What sucks about my script? Everything except the fact that it currently works for me and will work until the database size doubles which should be a while. Specifically it’s not dynamic at all. The script assumes we’re breaking the database into just two files (50M limit). Also it has no logging or error handling. But hey, I’m not an SA nor a scripter. Just a guy who needs to back up his database. Here’s the script:

export d=`date +%F`
mkdir YourDBName.db.""$d""_backup
cd YourDBName.db."$d"_backup
mysqldump --opt -u YourDBusername --password=YourDBpassword YourDBName |gzip -f >YourDBName.db."$d".gz
split -b 20m YourDBName.db."$d".gz YourDBName.db."$d".gz_part_
mpack -s YourDBName.db."$d".gz YourDBName.db."$d".gz_part_aa YourBackupAccount@gmail.com
mpack -s YourDBName.db."$d".gz YourDBName.db."$d".gz_part_ab YourBackupAccount@gmail.com
cd /root
rm -Rf YourDBName.db."$d"_backup

That’s it. To restore the database just do this: Check your email. Download the attachments and combine them. I just use “cat attachment_ab>>attachment_aa” which appends the contents from the 2nd file (ab) to the first (aa). Then you end up with a gziped version of your database under the filename of the first emailed file (*aa). To make it easy, rename the _aa file to YourDBName.gz. Then gunzip and do a “mysql -p YourPassword YourDBName < YourDBName”

Viola. Enjoy your Free Cloud Based Database Backup. It’s saved my ass more than once!