2)Zen in pills: less is better.
Limiting unnecessary features results in removing bugs, and, also, simplifying life.
What, no usb in the ipad? Buy an expensive adapter, if you really need it. No more than one mouse button,it’s easier for a beginner (though a frustration for an advanced user). Only one hardware button for the iPhone, etc.

3) He believed in Control, and limitation of freedom.
iPhone developers are not free to sell what they make, because you have to use Apple’s marketplace which can even stop your sells, without excuse. Controlling software sales means controlling the market. This is the first closed market platform in computer science history.
Employees at Apple’s have even limited privacy,or no privacy at all: their mobile phones are under control of the company.
Even scripting languages (flash, first of all) are banned, in order to achieve total control: you have to code in the language that Apple has chosen for you.
Limitation and control is justified to obtain a stable system, with no viruses, no porn, etc.

4) He understood that beauty, in a hedonistic and superficial society like ours in the last years, has a value.
So let’s make good looking devices, they will sell at a higher price.

5) He understood the power of religion and addiction, and founded a market on his believers who buy devices they probably don’t need, in an addicted state.

6) He was so “foolish” to avoid cancer medical treatments initially, which would have a chance to save his life. His cancer was so “hungry”, unfortunately.

7) He created a great computer, the NeXT machine, and he failed. Then he made money with something else.

He introduced censorship in the computer market, for contents and products, as a result of control and limitation.

I will miss this man.

So you’re stuck with Sony drivers, which don’t support the upgrade (boooh!).

The solution is to go to “laptopvideo2go” which have modified the .inf files to support different chipset signatures.

There you can download the driver AND the modified .inf file to replace the original one, which enables the driver to support almost any kind of branded chipset.

http://laptopvideo2go.com

In J2ME, something like:

1) I’m on form1, who is the consumer of commands, i.e. setcommandlistener(this) has been invoked.

2) an event (keyboard command) is fired, which is consumed on form1, who creates form2, pushes form2 on display, and sets form2 as command listener.

3) an event (keyboard command) like the previous one is fired.

Who I expect to consume this command ?

Since I’ve pushed form2 onto Display, and form2 is the command listener, I’d expect that form2 is the consumer…but …guess what ?

Well…it is , but not *always*.

If the second event is very close to the first, it is directed to form1 even if, in the meanwhile, form1 is not the current consumer.

It’s probably in the event list, and it is not forwarded to the current visible form…it goes to the one it was intended.

It makes sense, but it forces to add a lot of code to avoid to execute a command twice!

It seems that it expects a DHCP, which is not running on my network…so , the network interface doesn’t configure itself, and I cannot connect to the configuration web page.

(instructions say that to change the network ip you have to connect to the configuration page, but without an ip it’s a chicken-egg trouble).

I had to manually edit ifcfg-eth0 using:

vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-et0,

then I put this information

(which was jerky since the keboard was not correctly mapped) rebooted..done!

Now it boots and I can connect to the web page.

…but, I get a stupid I/O error trying to access /dev/fd0.

I had to enter BIOS settings in vsphere client, using

vm-edit settings-options-boot options-Force BIOS setup

and disable the floppy disk. ..The virtual appliance was not well done.

SL and Flex are very complementary to HTML(4 or 5)…you can use them when HTML is not enough. But this is a fact that only technicians understand very well…marketing people don’t seem to grasp it: Microsoft had some *very* big difficulties trying to position HTML5 into its market without shifting Silverlight away:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-our-strategy-with-silverlight-has-shifted/7834

Claiming “Silverlight is our development platform for Windows Phone” and “HTML is the only true cross platform solution for everything, including (Apple’s) iOS platform” could be enough to kill the future of a technology, after investing 4 years to gain trust, projecting Silverlight as the “Cross platform, Cross device technology”.

It’s like shooting themselves in their feet. HTML has always been good for web sites, not for applications. HTML5 is slightly better, but not good enough for applications.  Ask a C# developer to go back to HTML , CSS and Javascript, and you’ll be responsible for causing him depression.

The fact is, though the technology is better (and will be better for a long time, I guess), no CTO would invest a cent after these considerations, because it’s a matter of trust, which, in crisis’ time, is more important than ever.

Panic is the result:

http://silverlighthack.com/post/2010/10/29/PDC-2010-Top-5-Reasons-Why-Microsoft-Completely-Screwed-up-their-web-strategy-with-HTML-5.aspx

http://amazedsaint.blogspot.com/2010/10/silverlight-vs-html-5-debate-dilemma.html

…they tried to fix it, somehow:

http://team.silverlight.net/announcement/pdc-and-silverlight/

http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2010/11/01/silverlight-is-dead-long-live-silverlight.aspx

…“Shifting” a technology which is a must for the success of their last product (the Phone), and is one of the best things they have produced in many years, only to jump on the bandwagon of HTML5 crying “we’re there too!” is very foolish, and a very weak strategy.

It seems Mr Ballmer has balls only in his surname (if they don’t trust enough what they’ve built, how could a CTO trust it ?)…unless Microsoft has in its plans to acquire Adobe, keep Flash, and kill Silverlight.

I often forget the name of the utility, which is difficult to find from any menu:

cleanmgr.exe ! 

(Gene, my friend, would say “gootchaaa”)

from start->run

…select “Clean up system files”

a tab “more Options” appears…that’s magic.

..select “Clean up” – “are you sure ?”

yep.

I’ve just got the error

"ROUTE: route addition failed using CreateIpForwardEntry"

in Windows Vista. Same applies to Windows 7.

The solution is:

fetch the last OpenVPN (which includes OpenVpn GUI), add “run as an administrator” rights to the executable, that’s it.

Max

\\users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo

You can type “shell:sendto” in the start menu to open it quickly.

You can customize the “SendTo” menu simply adding a link to a folder, or a link to an application.

I usually put a link to Wordpad,  so that when I right-click a text file with an unusual extension, which is not recognized as a text, like in this case:

..I can open it in wordpad with only one click:

Another cool trick is to put a link to the same “SendTo” folder: in this way you can customize the SendTo folder simply selecting a folder shortcut that you want to add to the SendTo menu.

Max

“Flight 501, which took place on June 4, 1996, was the first, and unsuccessful, test flight of the European Ariane 5 expendable launch system. Due to an error in the software design (inadequate protection from integer overflow), the rocket veered off its flight path 37 seconds after launch and was destroyed by its automated self-destruct system when high aerodynamic forces caused the core of the vehicle to disintegrate. It is one of the most infamous computer bugs in history.”

“A software glitch forced 12 United States Air Force F-22A Raptor stealth fighters to cancel their first overseas flight, forcing them to turn back after suffering problems with their navigation systems.”

“When the group of Raptors crossed over the IDL, multiple computer systems crashed on the planes. Everything from fuel subsystems, to navigation and partial communications were completely taken offline. Numerous attempts were made to “reboot” the systems to no avail.”

“Toyota Prius Recall Traced to a Software Bug (…) While it was bared that the 300,000 Prius cars had brake issues the real culprit comes in the form of a bug in the antilock braking software.”

..the list could be much longer (Therac-25 among others, but see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unusual_software_bug for an interesting classification).

From mobile phones to cars, software code is quickly invading our lives: The number of LOCS (lines of code) which rule our world is rapidly growing, and the percentage of faulty ones is usually constant.

Let’s prepare ourselves to be invaded by bugs.

Max

I have some PDF to publish on my site, the problem is that they’re very big (50Mb), and it’s really annoying to wait for a download to finish in order to start reading.

The problem is solved with issuu.com : once you upload your document, you can read it after the first page is loaded into the browser, because a very powerful Flash online viewer is offered, for free.

BTW, the shelf which collects your documents is very similar to the one seen in iPad previews of the bookstore.

Max