John Stewart wreaked havoc on Apple last night over the leaked iPhone prototype. If you haven’t seen this, it’s worth a watch.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Appholes | ||||
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For a few weeks now, I’ve been boggling my mind over the fact that my the Remote App on my iPhone no longer works with iTunes. I’m running iTunes on Windows 7 (all updates are current). Here’s the sequence of frustrating events for anyone not familiar with this particular pain:
Long story short: Windows 7 doesn’t like the French. ”Bonjour” (the messaging service used to support the Remote App) was blocked by the Windows 7 Firewall. Bonjour didn’t even show up on the list – I had to locate it manually. On my system, it’s located at
C:\Program Files (x86)\Bonjour\mDNSResponder.exe
but your mileage may vary. Allow this executable in the Windows Firewall rules, and you’ll be all set to go.
Someone in my Facebook circle joined another one of those Join-this-group-to-stop-Facebook-from-charging-us-to-use-their-service groups earlier today. Out of pure morbid curiosity (read: I was stalling for time because I didn’t want to continue writing the paper that goes along with my senior project), I clicked through for kicks and giggles. What I found there was simply too scary/comical not to share. The group description says,
Facebook has announced they will be charging for the use of uploads, video streaming and instant msging as of july 10th 2010, help stop this from happening!! join the group to keep facebook free!!
I pulled from the group page the first wall post that popped out at me. Yes, the author seems to have had a bit of trouble regarding the Caps Lock key, but I invite you to give him a sporting chance and consider his argument:
The takeaway: If it was in print 500 years ago, we’re likely still discovering just how awesome it is. If it was in print 100 years ago, it may have some intellectual worth or it may not, but you can bet it will sound pretty. If it’s in print today (including digital formats), learn to exercise caution.
For those interested in a real cause to rally behind, see the petition to ban Dihydrogen Monoxide.
Update: Since I began drafting this post, over 13,000 new members have joined the group.
In the beginning of March, I set about to convert my typing habits to the Dvorak* layout. It’s been quite an experience so far, but I’m not looking back even considering that I could touch-type on QWERTY at over 110 words per minute and I’m only back up to about half that (with a much higher error frequency).
I’d been considering the switch for about a year, but with no real motivation to do so. Then, into the winter, my left pinky finger began to feel prickly, and even sometimes go a bit numb. It didn’t take much to correlate this with the massive amount of typing I do, and so I decided the time was rife to pick up a different keyboarding layout – not for speed (it’s still not certain that Dvorak is faster, although the evidence points that way) but for the sake of my hands. Just starting out my career, I can’t be subject to repetitive strain injury already.
The layout is certainly a lot different than QWERTY (although the a- and m- keys are in the same location)
It took only a few hours to memorize most of the key positions. I didn’t purchase a Dvorak keyboard (a waste of time and money, IMHO), I just changed the key bindings in my operating system.
While memorizing the layout, I kept a special browser window open to an image not unlike the one above. Learning on a standard QWERTY keyboard forced me to learn touch-typing from the word “go,” and the friction of switching to my special browser window led to a fairly quick memorization of the configuration.
All of that was easy-sauce. Far more difficult, of course, was retraining my muscle memory. As I said, it wasn’t easy. To go from 110+ WPM to a three second recall pause between every keystroke was agonizing at first – when I forgot that most things worth doing are worth doing because they aren’t easy (a mindset that Seth Godin explains elegantly in his book The Dip).
The most testing aspect of the transition, however, was the temptation to change back to QWERTY “real quick – I need to get this email out” or “just to send this hurried IM” or “because this paper is due tomorrow.”
The self-control to resist those temptations was the #1 reason (I feel) that I’ve been able to adapt so quickly, and I would warn anyone considering the switch about that particular challenge – stick it out, and it’ll come. Not fast. Not easy. But it’s worth it. I haven’t experienced any discomfort or loss of feeling in my hands for the better part of two months now.
The transition also brought one very unexpected albeit welcomed side effect. I’m much more apt to think before I type now because I’ve yet to regain full speed. This translates to more concise emails, more coherent papers, and vastly cleaner code.
NB: If you can’t touch type, and want to learn, I’d urge you to earnestly consider the merits and demerits of different (read: non-QWERTY) layouts before you proceed. If you can touch type on some other layout, but want to switch to Dvorak, I’d advise you to have a good reason for doing it – at times, that reason will be the only thing to keep you in touch with your sanity.
*I use the term “Dvorak” throughout to describe the Simplified Dvorak Layout, as opposed to the Original Dvorak configuration.
I’m sure you recall the terrible, horrifying, mind-bogglingly apocalyptic Y2K bug. When the clocks rolled over from year 1999 to 2000, it was predicted that outdated software (built only to handle years in the 1900′s) could crash, leading to global outages of all sorts of computer-based services.
Turns out it wasn’t so bad. There were a few problems of course, but nothing horrific as far as the average Joe was concerned.
It was called the “Y2K” phenomena because “Y2K” is a lot faster than saying “year two thousand,” “second millenium,” or “turn of the century.” It’s the same number of syllables as “two thousand” but is shorter to type by one whole character. And it sounds really catchy. Okay – they had me sold on that.
Turns out, a similar situation will occur about 18 years from now. On Tuesday, January 19th, 2038 at 03:14:07, the internal representation of time for many current computers will experience a rollover much like the 99->00 bug in the Y2K scenario, sending them back to midnight on January 1, 1970.
Now, there are lots of reasons why this is unlikely to be an issue at a large scale. Nevertheless the event has its own Wikipedia page and a whole host of folks with nothing better to do than predict it’s direct contributing effect to the end of the Universe.
Okay – that’s cool. Everyone needs a hobby. But I can’t stand the “historical” appellation this event is being given. Why in the name of HTTP would you perpetuate the use of the term “Y2K38″? It doesn’t make any sense!
I propose we stick with “2038.” Or even simply “38.” There is no circumstance under which we need to pay any homage to the wannabe catastrophe of ten years ago.
Many things in technology are the way they are due to their historical context. Take the QWERTY keyboard layout, for example. Many of these types of things would take loads of time and money to rectify on a large scale, and simply aren’t worth the effort. What we can easily do, however, is actively prevent ourselves from creating more of these bass ackwards situations for the future.
I think that studying our history is extremely important – how are we supposed to understand what is without understanding first what was? But this is simply ludicrous. Please, as a responsible Netizen, do not perpetuate the use of this terribly anachronistic abuse of linguistic freedom.