Saturday, July 14, 2007

 

Do I want an iPhone?

The New York Times has two entertaining videos by David Pogue about the new iPhone, the pre-release The iPhone Challenge: Keep It Quiet and I want an iPhone.

What is all this hype about? I guess it holds true that good design is still good business, and Apple certainly knows good design, at least when it comes to user interfaces. Not allowing the user to extend the device or even just change the battery may follow the Apple philosophy that users don't need to care what's inside, but requiring customers to send in the phone, wait three business days, pay $85.95 to get the phone "repaired" as Apple calls it and have all your data deleted during that process is not good design.

Dear Apple folks, please try harder!

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Thursday, July 12, 2007

 

Luncheon at Le Château

After two days of hot and humid weather, the thunderstorm and heavy rain last night had worked miracles and today was a beautiful day, just perfect for a luncheon at Le Château in South Salem, New York, to celebrate the successful launch of our latest Website design and the Virtual Business Center in Second Life.

It was good to meet so many colleagues and friends, including some people who I had worked with for a while but never met in person. We started with drinks and hors d'oeuvres in the garden, followed by short talks by our executives and an awards ceremony before we went on with lunch. Well, actually, since we were running behind, lunch didn't quite start after but during the business session. It was kind of weird to see restaurant staff squeeze through between our executives with soup bowls while they were still handing out awards and congratulating award winners. The lunch was excellent though, and we all had a good time at Le Château.

At night Christian and I met with Margaret at a restaurant in Armonk, Opus 465, for a light dinner and interesting discussions about processes (so yes, we did get some work done and not just eat all day long!)

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Tuesday, July 10, 2007

 

Wabisabilabi

While sitting at Vienna airport and waiting for my flight to New York, a newspaper article about a security startup caught my attention: The Swiss company Wabisabilabi has established a market place for security exposures with the intent to give security experts "fair compensation for their discoveries".

Googling for the easy to remember company name (Vienna airport now has wireless connectivity and unlike other airports this is offered for free, nice!) I stumble across a good number of articles which sound very similar to the press release, I mean, article I just read ... becoming the EBay of zero-day exploits, finally a market place for security issues.

The first two search results are obviously the new site that's going to make the world more secure. Not that they have figured out how to give pages meaningful titles yet:

On to the press release at https://www.wslabi.com/wabisabilabi/news.do -- mistakes happen but finding a typo in the first press release of a company looks odd. Equally odd is their math: "Recently it was reported that although researchers had analyzed a little more than 7,000 publicly disclosed vulnerabilities last year, the number of new vulnerabilities found in code could be as high as 139,362." Exactly 139,362, huh?

Not much information about the company either, looks like a British Limited company although there is no company registration information on the site (or at least I haven't found it). I guess I will sign up anyway and see what they have to offer.

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Wednesday, July 4, 2007

 

Google dropped my site

Google's Matt Cutts asked for feedback on the webmaster guidelines and I gladly shared my experience there:

Recently, Google sent me an email entitled "Entfernung Ihrer Webseite sitename aus dem Google Index", notifying me that one of my sites had been dropped from the Google index for violating the content quality guidelines. Now that site certainly deserved to be dropped for various reasons, not the least being that the content was old and not highly relevant and I am quite happy to see that site dropped.

I couldn’t find anything related to the specific issue highlighted. In addition the issue highlighted doesn’t exist (or I don’t understand what it is trying to say, maybe something got lost in the translation since the mail was in German):
Wir haben auf Ihren Seiten insbesondere die Verwendung folgender Techniken festgestellt:
*Seiten wie z. B. example.com, die zu Seiten wie z. B. http://www.example.com/index.htm mit Hilfe eines Redirects weiterleiten, der nicht mit unseren Richtlinien konform ist.
Translation: In particular we have noticed the following techniques on your pages: * Pages such as example.com, which redirect to pages such as http://www.example.com/index.htm using redirects, which is not compliant with our guidelines.

Now since when does Google consider redirects within a site evil? Plus, the referenced domain example.com does not even exist, nor does the homepage redirect either.

I couldn't care less about this particular site. What worries me though is that I haven't been able to identify how the site violates the guidelines, even after reading the guidelines more than once, and chances are that I have used the same techniques on other sites where I do care.

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Tuesday, June 26, 2007

 

Timely communication

Apparently IEEE offered some incentive last year for renewing the membership before year end which I had completely forgot about, or not even noticed when I renewed my membership. This morning I received a friendly invitation to claim my free eBook:
"Because you renewed your IEEE membership by Dec. 31, 2006, you are eligible to download an IEEE-USA eBook at no cost!"

Nothing terribly wrong with this, although I wonder why it takes an engineering organization 178 days to send an e-mail with a download link.

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Security by obscurity

developer.com ran an article about AJAX security, the title of which caught my attention. The suggestions the author makes, however, are either obvious (use a well-tested framework instead of writing your own code) or plain wrong (pretty much the rest of the suggestions). Michael Baierl has commented in detail about what's wrong with this article.

Another unfortunate case of security by obscurity.

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Wednesday, May 16, 2007

 

.net special issue about Google

The .net magazine has a special issue about Google. Looks pretty interesting judging from Matt Cutt's totally unbiased comments about it :-) and I haven't read .net for a while, the only problem is that this issue has sold out! I had tried to order a copy from www.myfavouritemagazines.co.uk (nice and easy to type URL!) but the Website was acting strangely when I tried and insisted that I had placed an order for the wrong continent, and when I tried again -- gone. Sooooo, if anyone happens to have a spare copy of the May 2007 issue of the .net magazine ...

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Saturday, April 28, 2007

 

Nikon D80 battery woes continued

The battery problem I had last week is back and occurring with increasing frequency, so apparently it wasn't the lens mount. Nikon support suggests to have both the camera and battery checked, which probably means a few weeks without the camera. It may be faster to get another battery first (I need a spare anyway for traveling) and see if the new battery works any better.

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Saturday, April 21, 2007

 

Nikon D80 battery woes

So far I have been pretty happy with my Nikon D80, but a weird problem has started to show up more frequently: At first the battery appears full, then after taking one picture the battery shows as almost empty and the camera refuses to take pictures. Turn the camera off and on, and the battery appears full again ... pretty annoying.

Google doesn't find any reports of exactly this issue, but some Websites suggest that this may be a problem with the lens mount. For some reason the lens waggles a little and seems to have been in awkward position causing this behavior, and joggling the lens seems to indeed resolve the battery problem.

Now the lens shouldn't waggle in the lens mount but that's a different story ...

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Sunday, April 8, 2007

 

The ten hour power strip project

How long does it take the average person to install a power strip? Probably less than ten hours, which is about the time I spent under my desk today.

When I had my apartment renovated some years ago, the electrician wondered why anyone would need as many as six power outlets in one corner. I should have insisted on at least twenty then. Over time I have accumulated several power strips, and when I ran out of outlets recently I bought another one, which was too large and bulky to place on the desk (where I needed more outlets) so it was time to shuffle the cables around.

While under the desk I figured that I could finally label all my cables (a long-term cleanup plan) so unplugging a device wouldn't be an adventure of following nested cables and eventually picking the wrong one anyway. And before I could do that I obviously had to untangle the snarl of cables, which meant unplugging all devices, and clean off the pile dust that had accumulated over time. We did go for shopping in the afternoon and I got ahold of nice cable binders, so after hours under the desk everything is nice and clean now, all cables nicely labeled and ... everything still works!

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