opinion I suppose I will really never be able to fulfill my childhood dream of working for Apple Computer, Inc. Bummer. The changing of the name from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple, Inc. is certainly symbolic, but I think carries far more weight in the industry than anybody is really giving credence.

Over five years ago, Apple told us that the Mac was becoming/is the digital media hub. They told us that the Mac was going to be the center of our digital life, and like a dropping a penny into an empty well, nothing happened. A glance of the industry as a whole is almost sickening in terms of the void that just didn't get filled. Apple should not have needed to create the iPod. Apple should not have needed to create the iPhone. To paraphrase what Steve Jobs said to a reporter from CNBC "we create products we want to [need/]use." Apple is slowly learning what John D. Rockefeller learned over a hundred years ago, vertical mergers will make you obscenely rich, or to put it more succinctly in terms of Apple's situation, you cannot trust the rest of the industry "figure it out." The Nomad Jukebox is a decent device, but it doesn't integrate into the rest of my "digital life" like the iPod did when it came out. The Motorola Razr, or the Blackberry are all nice devices, they sleek, they have appeal, but they just suck. The software is miserable, and they don't integrate like the iPhone does/will, so they're doomed to play the second-fiddle that Microsoft is finding itself playing with regards to the Zune.

Moving from Apple Computer to just Apple is a weighty change at least in terms of the company mindset that should have the rest of the industry scared sh#$less. Apple is moving away from just computers to something most Mac OS X users have become familiar with, the experience which they have excelled and building with iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes, and the peripherals to go with them. While Microsoft did beat Apple into the living room with the original XBox (I know a number of people that use their first gen XBoxes as both DVD players and media hubs), appleTV has some catching up to do, but has something Microsoft doesn't (besides the religious fanbase), the "experience" necessary to get every joe and smoe type to not only desire an appleTV, but actually use it.

The iPhone is a good example of Apple's power to look at an existing market and completely change the "level of play" required to compete in that market, and do it in such a way that everybody from Main Street to Wall Street is now paying attention.


That's officially my one, requisite, Macworld 2007 blog posting. I'll finish with this image, courtesy of David Young's blog.

AAPL vs. RIMM

pwned

media Yesterday afternoon at the Flash Fire Facility we got a visit from Rick Mercer. Since it won't be airing for a week or so (and thankfully I won't be in it) I won't yet comment on the stuff we did, but it was pretty cool. It was a lot more fun than some of the other TV spots we've done (local news, Daily Planet). Rick was pretty cool, and needless to say very funny. I'd invite him over for a BBQ anyday.

miscellaneous Almost exactly 333 miles into this trip, and I find myself sitting at a texas rest area (free wireless!). I stopped here about 50% because of the free wireless, and about 50% because I really wanted to see what it felt like to go to the bathroom in 30 degree temperatures.

Unfortunately, thus far the coolest things I've seen are, something on fire on the side of the road, and the moon. West texas isn't really all that exciting. I better get back to cruising though, El Paso is something like 260 miles from here.

I don't plan on making regular blogging stops, this one just happens to coincide with a more biological deadline.

Hoping to be through New Mexico by sun up. Eep.

miscellaneous Over 3,500 miles.

Over 27 hours of driving.

One big Mac conference to attend.

This is absolutely insane.

academia Interesting post on Groklaw about freely available "courseware". The OpenCourseWare Consortium seems like a fantastic idea to me. Academia is really all about sharing knowledge.

I've already bookmarked the MIT Mechanical Engineering page, though I can usually find comparable material in my own department.

miscellaneous I have mentioned this to a few people already, but I will be attending te MacWorld Expo this year. Unfortunately the project I have been hustling to attempt to finish in time for MacWorld will not be done until late january/february, so I'll be schmoozing and talking it up at MacWorld, and walking around with a big dunce hat on my head.

The Tour Map

True to my inherent nature (see: dunce), I will be packing the bleep roadshow into my super-mega-awesome VW Jetta and driving from San Antonio to San Francisco. What does this mean for you I bet you're contemplating, well, a one time opportunity not only to meet me (a rare honor only bestowed various hiring managers and women of the night) but you too can buy me a beer, lunch, or dinner! If you're a Mac/Mono developer and just happen to either be in San Francisco next week, or along the way, drop me an email (tyler@bleepsoft.com) and I'd be more than happy to stop in $CITY long enough to grab a bite to eat.

I'm not completely sure what to expect, nor how to schedule my time while there. I'm thinking about forgoing buying a "Users Conference" ticket or a "MacIT Conference" since it seems to be as large a waste of money as lighting my January rent payment on fire. Right now I'm planning on buying an exhibit hall ticket, bringing a stack of business cards, and resumés and seeing how many people I can meet.

Again, if you're going to be there, let me know. The bleep roadshow departs early on the 7th, so my email will be hit and miss en route.

opinion I may be too young to remember a Hewlett-Packard that actually innovated and hired engineers to do more than design crap personal computers, and crappier printers. Like an absolute dolt, I assumed this HP LaserJet 1020 would somehow be different. This time, things would some how work. This time, I wouldn't let myself be suckered in by the promise of quick, efficient printing.

This time, I would be duped again.

This printing saga started with an HP Photosmart C3100, a printer that somebdoy thought the all-in-one-ness of the printer would be a great choice, and by golly, the box says it supports Mac OS X! What a gullible chud I turned out to be. As I sat looking at the HP Printer Setup Utility on the right side of my screen complaining that it could not find the printer on the USB bus, and the Mac OS X Printer Setup Utility on the left side of my screen properly finding and identifying the printer on the USB bus, I honestly felt a little part of my soul curling into a ball and just dying. To make things worse, this was on a PowerPC Mac, who knows what sort of explosive chemical reactions might of occurred if I had trying this with my Intel Mac.

Fast forward at least a year, to a poorly lit apartment in north-western San Antonio. A tall man stares blankly at a printer recently removed from the styrofoam entombing it, wondering first why there is a power cable included in the box but no USB cable, then progressing along to the toner cartridge which has no directions, nor indication on how it is to be inserted into the beast of a printer that lay before him. As with most peripherals purchased from anywhere but an Apple Store, this device may or may not work with Mac OS X (after looking online, the HP LaserJet 1020 apparently can be used from Mac OS X with a 1022 driver). After installing the 1022 driver from the HP.com website, precocious hope is quickly replaced by a subdued rage as the gorgeous 20" screen dims and a message that means nothing other than "restart" is displayed in the center. Shortly after reaching behind the screen and pressing the power button, the message is displayed again as the machine boots up. The device is angrily moved from one end of the office to the other and plugged into a hideous looking Dell machine lying tucked away, following a brief install process, the device succeeds in printing a "Windows Test Page" to verify its functionality, and nothing more.

Fast forward another couple of days, my attempts to print a PDF from within Mail.app are greeted with a similar subdued anger staring at a crash report from Mail.app and a stack trace that contains the following:

Thread 0 Crashed:
0 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x90859b76 CFBundleCopyLocalizedString + 106
1 com.hp.framework.imaging 0x0eec21f2 AResAccess::CopyExplanationString(ExpType, __CFString const*, short, unsigned char) + 152
2 com.hp.framework.imaging 0x0eec3b72 AControl::CopyDescriptionString(__CFString const*, __CFString const*) + 132
3 com.hp.framework.imaging 0x0eec382f AControl::InitDescriptions(OpaqueControlRef*) + 61
4 com.hp.framework.imaging 0x0eec2b38 ABooleanControl::ABooleanControl[in-charge](__CFString const*, AAccess*, OpaqueControlRef*) + 46
5 com.hp.framework.imaging 0x0eec4a17 AControl::ControlFactory(AAccess*, __CFString const*, OpaqueControlRef*, int) + 313
6 com.hp.framework.imaging 0x0eec4fbf AControlGroup::AddNewControl(ADataProvider*, __CFString const*, int) + 83


I now have an HP LaserJet 1020, sitting on the counter that won't print from Windows, Mac OS X, or any Linux I've tried. Excluding Mac OS X/intel, all the OSes properly identify and configure the device, but that's about as far as any of them can go before meeting the iron curtain HP has wrapped around their miserable hardware and software. I have a feeling that the HP iPod was the last device that Hewlett-Packard sold that actually worked, everything I've either purchased, or come across of theirs certainly doesn't.

R.I.P. Hewlett-Packard; at one point it did grand things in the industry, only to die a slow, suffocating death from its own desire to compete in a flooded commodity PC and printer market.

miscellaneous I came across this blog posting yesterday and figured I'd relay it because all of a sudden it's changed how I transfer large files. While scp(1) doesn't support resuming, but rsync(1) does and in a very Captain Planet-esque fashion, their combined powers allow for secure, resumable file transfers.

By adding the following alias to .profile you can easily switch from the stock-scp to a resumable one:
alias scpresume="rsync --partial --progress --rsh=ssh"

It's then just a matter of using "scpresume" where I would use scp(1):
intellian% scpresume medahugefile.tar.gz remotehost:

This shouldn't incur too much overhead, but it sure makes large transfers much less painfull on a bad home-user uplink.

miscellaneous After talking with Phil Aaronson about a recent rant of mine (Bribing Bloggers, Better) I found out that this domain was available and couldn't resist the temptation. I've been meaning to move to a Drupal-based blogthing for quite some time, and the perfect storm of the domain being available and having a brief moment of free time combined with $9 led to the creation of unethical blogger.

My own personal blog URL on the site is http://www.unethicalblogger.com/blog/tyler and I've left open user registration, so you too can have an unethical blog! For example, if I were a Vista shill, I could magically register the username "vistashill" and have an unethical blog at http://www.unethicalblogger.com/blog/vistashill and well, you get the point. I'm going to leave this open and see where it takes me, I am not putting ads on this site, but I must mention the hosting is provided ever-so-graciously by my (good?) friend Dave Steinberg over at GeekISP (GeekISP also happens to host the bleep subversion repository, amongst other things).

I've had better, but I've also had much worse ideas, we'll see where unethical blogging takes me.

miscellaneous Why would I sign up for another blog when I barely even create content for the first one? Maybe now I can keep that one clear of random bitching and cell phone reviews.

Besides, tyler is one cool frood.