The press writes a lot about this topic, and especially here in germany this release quite a storm of outrage about the evil internet company which wants to know everything about us. Even the german minister of consumer protection, Ilse Aigner (german), got involved. She already has a colorful history with Mark Zuckerberg about privacy issues concerning facebook.com where she threatened the world she will delete here profile there if nothing happens.

My opinion to all this stuff is: If you leave your network visible, or don’t use encryption, it’s your own fault! EVERYBODY could walk down the street with a laptop and record traffic of unencrypted networks. So why harass Google about it if people are simply too lazy to even care about their information? Sure, a scan for SSIDs in the vicinity should have been enough, but so what. Same goes for the insurgence about photographs of the houses for Street View itself. If you don’t want your house to be seen from the street, build a wall around it, or grow a hedge. I might come by with my 12 megapixel camera and take a photo. Hell, I might even put that photo on the internet!!

Just use a common stirring gear, add your ingredients, mix it and add a small portion of liquid nitrogen – Let the Nitrogen boil out and ready is the ice cream!

Recently I had to migrate Newsletter subscribers to a newly created subscription system which uses an Oracle Database (I would have preferred PostgreSQL) rather than a MySQL, as the old system does.

Programmers are lazy, and as expected the developers of the old system used the OLD_PASSWORD(str) function from the database available to hash the password entered by the user. This is a very convenient way to protect the users’ login credentials, but rather bad when migrating to another system which has different or none implementations of this functionality. So what do we do? The options are:

• Send every user a new password. Bad, we don’t want to harass them with our technical issues.
• Force them to set a new password when they log in the next time. See above
• Try to find a solution to validate the password against the old password hash.

As MySQL is widely used and a lot of data migration happens to and from, someone must have been run in this issue already, and most likely there is a solution to this problem in the net. And there is. I found a reimplementation of the OLD_PASSWORD() function in C# at yourhelpcenter.de (attention, german) and together with my coworker Maurice we ported it to Java, resulting in this piece of code:

public static String mysqlOldPassword(byte[] password) {
        int[] result = new int[2];
        int nr = 1345345333;
        int add = 7;
        int nr2 = 0x12345671;
        int tmp;

        int i;
        for (i = 0; i < password.length; i++) {
            if (password[i] == ' ' || password[i] == '\t')
                continue;

            tmp = (int) password[i];
            nr ^= (((nr & 63) + add) * tmp) + (nr << 8);
            nr2 += (nr2 << 8) ^ nr;
            add += tmp;
        }

        result[0] = nr & ((1 << 31) - 1);
        int val = ((1 << 31) - 1);
        result[1] = nr2 & val;
        String hash = String.format("%08x%08x",result[0],result[1]);
        return hash.toLowerCase();
    }

I give no guarantee this will work in all cases. My IDE complains all over the place about possible integer overflows. The usage of Integer.toHexString()did not work either, as the resulting String is not padded up with zeroes.

Finally, some Unit Tests for the interested user:

    @Test
    public void testOldPassword() throws Exception {
        final String expected = "0414ac6137ee1adc";
        byte[] bytes = "fooo".getBytes("UTF8");
        String foo = mysqlOldPassword(bytes);
        assertEquals(expected, foo);
    }

    @Test
    public void testOldPassword2() throws Exception {
        final String expected = "3fa0dce62ba931b5";
        byte[] bytes = "hastewas".getBytes("UTF8");
        String foo = mysqlOldPassword(bytes);
        assertEquals(expected, foo);
    }

Have fun with it!

And everyone else…

via @pommesbude

Update:Youtube seemingly has killed the video, but the original version is still available here.

GPGMail

As it seems, GPGMail, a plugin which integrates a local installation of GnuPG to Apples Mail, seems to use a lot of internal API which of course is not supported officially and subject to frequent change, stopped working. The GPGMail maintainer seems to have no time to update it to the new API, but fortunately Lukas Pitschl stepped up to update it. Up to now now official release of GPGMail was rolled out, but reasonable stable versions are offered by Lukas via hist Dropbox or Github. The latest 1.2.3-v61 works for me so far. Thanks!

Macports

Having a history with Gentoo Linux I simply love the ports system, so I chose Macports over Fink to add additional Unix/Linux software to my Mac.

After upgrading Macports does will simply stopp to work with a somewhat strange Tcl error message, at least this was the case with me. Thus a sudo port selfupdate failed as well. So I downloaded the Snow Leopard version and installed it to get a working port command again. Even after this some port commands will fails, mostly due to architecture constraints of the older 32bit parts on Leopard vs. the new Snow Leopard 64bit.

After upgrading to the new Macports for Snow Leopard, the Migration page in the Macports wiki describes how to upgrade your installed ports to a new system. As I don’t need all installed ports any more I took the manual approach described, by simply removing all ports and re-building the parts I still need on my system. It needs some effort to upgrade, but with the view ports I use took just a few minutes to select the ports I need and a few hours of building while the system is still usable for other things.

iStat Menu

I like these little nerdy monitor items in the menu bar which tell me how much RAM I use, how the system load is or how much traffic is on the network. On Leopard I used the iStat menus in version 1.3, but these don’t work on Snow Leopard. iStat Menus version 3 comes as a trial version and will stop working after some time, so this is unfortunately no permanent solution. A friend of mine got a beta release of version 2 in preparation for the Snow leopard release which works well as long as you disable the update mechanism, but I couldn’t find the download link to this package.

So I started looking for alternatives to this proprietary software and found MenuMeters by Raging Menace which is GPL software. It does not look as nice the iStat menus look, and does not offer monitors for the temperature sensors, but basic Network/HD IO, CPU and memory usage are covered, which will suffice for me for now.

So much for now on this topic, let’s see if this was it all…

Als aller erstes fällt mir auf dass der Safari auf dem iPad es nicht hinbekommt den WYSIWYG-Editor von meinem Blog hier richtig darzustellen. Das ist natürlich ziemlich doof wenn man bloggen will, und man nicht einmal den Fokus auf das Eingabefeld setzen kann… Und die Eingabe im Code-Modus ist genau so schlimm, denn man muss zwischen drei Modi der On-Screen-Tastatur hin- und herspringen um nur ein blödes Paragraph-Element zu öffnen oder zu schließen. Ebenso komisch ist es Umlaute zu tippen: hierzu muss man einfach länger auf dem a bleiben, um ein ä (oder andere Abwandlungen davon) zu bekommen. Für iPhone User ist das natürlich Usus und perfekt, die waren noch nie was anderes gewohnt. Fazit: Die Tastatur ist soweit nicht schlecht, aber effizient mit 10 Fingern erfordert Übung. Zumindest mehr als man an einem Abend rumspielen schafft. Auch wenn die Tastatur auf dem Bildschirm in etwa so breit wie die eines Laptops ist, der Winkel ist meiner Meinung alles andere als bequem und ich kann mir nur mit viel Fantasie vorstellen mit dem Gerät auf dem Schoß lange Emails zu tipppen.

So, nach zwei Absätzen der Pein bin ich jetzt wieder auf die gewohnte Tastatur meines Laptops umgestiegen. Nach den zwei Absätzen auf dem iPad hat sich doch eine gewissen Routine eingestellt. Ich konnte schon halbwegs blind tippen und sogar Umlaute gingen relativ intuitiv. Ebenso das Positionieren des Cursors im Text, wenn man sich vertippt hatte, sowie Copy & Paste. Auch wenn das alles schön und gut ist, und mit längerer Verwendung die Eingabe noch flüssiger geht: die fehlenden Umlaute auf der Tastatur (was natürlich dem Format geschuldet ist) stören den Fluss bei der Eingabe doch erheblich, und der ständige Modi-Wechsel für Ziffern oder Sonderzeichen ebenso. Soviel mal zur Texteingabe.

Mit dem mitgelieferten Safari hatte ich auch meinen Spaß. Wie weiter oben schon erwähnt weigert er sich den WordPress-WYSIWYG Editor benutzbar darzustellen. Selbiges sind mir mit einigen weiteren AJAX-Webseiten aufgefallen. So war es mir unmöglich den Google Reader zu steuern, sowohl in der Mobil- als auch in der Full-Fledged Variante. Auch wenn es solche Anwendungen sicher gute Programme für das iPad gibt sollte ein Browser doch zumindest reine HTML5+AJAX Funktionalitäten unterstützen, was Apple ja in seiner öffentlichen Diskussion mit Adobe bezüglich der Unterstützung von Flash auf Apples mobilem Betriebssystem ja als unterstützenswerte Standards angibt. Apple mutiert was sowas angeht tatsächlich zu einem kleinen Goliath.

Die restlichen Navigation ist Apple-typisch absolut intuitiv. Des öfteren habe ich mich über kurze Auswahl-Seiten wie z.B. im iTunes Laden gewundert, um dann festzustellen dass man da auch nach unten scrollen kann. Der Scrollbar (oder eine “Positionsanzeige”) wird beim Scrollen (und nur dann!) über dem Inhalt dargestellt. Diese Darstellung kenne ich auch von meinem N900, jedoch wird dort beim Laden der Seite im Browser der Balken immer eingeblendet, wird dann ausgeblendet, aber beim Scrollen auch wieder Sichtbar. Gut, das ist nicht wirklich wichtig, ich bin dieser Unzulänglichkeit aber auf den Leim gegangen.

So, mal von der Eingabe weg zur Hardware. Unabhängig davon ist das ganze schon ein sehr beeindruckendes Gerät. Absolut sexy Format. Es fühlt sich, ohne jetzt in den Apple-Fanboy-Talk verfallen zu wollen, einfach alles Richtig an. Auch wenn es prinzipiell nur vier aneinander-geklebte iPhones sind…

Mein Fazit ist demnach: Alles in allem ist das iPad ein typisches Apple Gerät: Hard- und Software sind qualitativ hochwertig, es fühlt sich gut an und erfüllt seinen Zweck. Wie die meisten anderen Apple-Produkte unterliegt das Gerät und die Software natürlich den Apple-Typischen Restriktionen: Nur Software aus dem App-Store von Apple, den Dock-Connector als einzige, proprietäre Schnittstelle. Hiermit haben sich die Apple-Fan-Boys/-Girls ja schon abgefunden. Das heisst: Wenn man ein kleines Surf-Brett für den Balkon oder das Bett, oder ein kleines Gerät für die tägliche Arbeiten wie Mails checken oder kleinere Dokumente schreiben haben will, und natürlich zum Zocken, kann sich die Anschaffung ernsthaft überlegen. Ich bin noch unentschlossen ob ich sowas brauche.

The more interested I was when I found out about steereo.de, a new and somewhat similar service comming from germany. They, integrated a nice player bar at the bottom of their page, and over all it’s a pretty funky page. Not, as tidy as last.fm, but it will work.

The most interesting part of this all is: They didn’t want to let me on their page. I think I use a pretty recent browser for my day-to-day portion of web surfing, but not as new as they want me to:

As it seems, they just support recent versions IE + FF, but no Safari. I thought we’ve passed this to implement major browser-dependend tweaks in our pages. As it seems I was wrong.

At least this trial might make some of us think about copyright and such things. There is a hudge discrepancy between what the crowd does and what the IP organizations want us to do. Once more I think Lawrence Lessig brings it to the point best:

In the analog times you had to buy book, a newspaper or a disk to gain access to the story or the song. So, making copies of books or songs was actually hard work back then. Nowadays, creating copies of digital content is easy peasy. In fact, everytime you view a digital content from the web, you actually get a copy.

Bug they will never understand…

Via Techdirt.

I hope mine does not fly away like this one day…

Awesome, somehow. Isn’t it?

Now, Facebook went one step further by displaying all activities in the facebook network on a globe, distinguishing events by colors, and stuff. The project is named Palantir, like the crystal ball from LOTR which Saruman used as means of communication with Sauron. See the demo video. Most astonishing: Palantir is implemented using JavaME!

This all looks pretty neat. Facebook users mentioned that Google has something similar to visualize searches for years, and even my old employer CortalConsors visualized all trades with volume and location in the lobby for about 2-3 years! But still, the Facebook Palantir awesome!

Why is it so hard for Microsoft to implement such a update mechanism? I really was astonished: one click, one reboot – up and running. No harsh feelings, no pain in the a**. It just works. I like software like this.

But the ture origin of the device was revealed recently:

via xkcd.

$ defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
$ killall Finder

As you might guess the first line sets the option somehow and the second line kills all Finder windows belonging to the current User. As the Desktop also is a Finder process, it will restart immediately.

defaults seems to be a small CLI to some kind of user preferences service within OS X. You can list e.g. all preferences for the current user from the finder by invoking:

$defaults read com.apple.finder

The result will look a bit like a cascaded associative array. I think there’s some more to fiddle with.

Via Lifehacker.

Apart from that, the Company From Redmond commissioned, or sponsored, as they call it, an analysis from Endpoint Technologies Associates, which should transparently describe the “Apple Tax”. At the first glance the form (filled out by hand, as it seems) looks pretty convincing, stating an overall saving of more than 3300 bucks when you buy a PC instead of a Mac. Is that really true?

Ina Fried from Cnet took a closer look at the findings and is not convinced. The report states no additional license fees for the Windows systems despite the OEM licenses included in the hardware price. Where do they get there Software from? Do they use OpenOffice? Do they use copies from their friends illegally? Why do they list the (totally optional) MobileMe account? This account on it’s own bills for about $750 in the five years. I know only one person who uses MobileMe and he will discontinue it.

Sure, Apple hardware is more expansive in comparison to PC hardware, that’s true. But as the Windows Experience Blog states correctly, it’s not only about cost, but about value. I’m an Apple user for about a half year now and I think I get a lot more value for my money than for my previous laptops, which were PC systems. In germany we have two words to describe this difference. The word which describes a possibly good deal is “günstig”, which translates well to cheap as in low priced. “billig” also means cheap, but more in a kind of this product’s kinda crappy way. A lot of PC hardware in the past was “billig”, and the present one often still is. The hardware of these systems does not fit together well, the cheap ones still have a ridiculously low resolution (I will never work willingly on anything below 1400×900 on 14″ or 15″ screens). The chassis stability of Macs might be reached by Thinkpads, but the Design I think is still leading, though it is quite simply.

To the software. I had installed Windows on my previous PC systems, and I even have a BootCamp installation with Windows XP on it on my Mac. I boot it two or three times a month to play games which unfortunately are not available for OSX (Assasins Creed and Fallout 3) and don’t work with Crossover Games properly. That’s all I use it for, and, hell, that’s all I need it for. The last five years I solely worked on Unix- and Linux- based systems. And I like it. Instead of clicking around endlessly in the explorer or the System Control I have a powerful shell (zsh or bash) and I can do everything on the fast lane. For the direct functions of the operating system the clicking point is also valid for OSX. But the simple gestures on the trackpad, or the Expose configuration is so addictive I tried to switch workspaces on my Linux workstation in the office by moving the mouse pointer to the upper right corner only two days after I bought my first Mac (yeah, I know. This might become a problem someday).

The important part for me is: Mac OSX, while shiny and colorful, has a Unix foundation, which is (IMO, even if not open source), a good thing. No ugly Cygwin necessary. There is MacPorts. There is Fink. Lots of stuff I need for everyday life. And the parts which come with OSX UI are most natural and intuitive.

To the point. I like Apple Hardware and Software, because

• It looks kinda cool. This sure is one major point why Apple is so successful.
• The hardware is sturdy.
• The software fits my needs.
• There is not that much malware, spyware and other bad stuff for OSX, if any.
• There is a usable Unix environment underneath all that glamour.
• I am not ridicuously accurate about free software licenses, though I like and respect free software in general.

I have stopped looking into Microsoft’s operating systems since Windows 2000. As mentioned before I’ve run XP on my Samsung X20 and MacBook Pro for gaming only. This was good as I can tell you now. Having started at a new Job I need to speak with a funny Exchange Server from Redmond Industries which I could not get up and running with anything I tried with Evolution, so I continued using the pre-installed Vista. It looks good enough for now, but still is a plain continuation of the user interface concepts from Windows 95. I still have to use the embedded context menue to create a new folder. It still comes with 2 tons of funny software preinstalled which needs to be cleaned out before you can somehow work with the system. Every tool which should bring me some sane Virtual Desktop support is either broken somehow, or is totally cumbersome to use. I think this will be my next desktop wallpaper…

But this would not help either, this mail setup does not work for Entourage either.

So I’m (again, for once) stuck with Windows and no light at the end of the tunnel. I think I’ll, if time allowes, play a bit more with an Ubuntu in some virtual box setup and try to get Mail access up and running with Linux. Till then I need to work around with the most sane environment on windows, which still is Cygwin, which offers a sane xterm, zsh/bash, screen and some other utilities which I never want to miss.

Comming back to the topic of this post: There sure is some kind of “Apple Tax” if you want to call it that. BUT I really really doubt that it is so high as described in the Microsoft-paid paper. My opinion is that users get more value for a higher price. Some of the added value is purely aestetic, another is less pain in the ass, as they don’t bloat up their registry with a ton of funny entries for installing software they simply want to try, viruses, malware, The Search For The Driver(tm) and other stuff. The whole software suit from Apple is much more integrated and more simple to use. Every user has to decide whether they think it’s worth the price for them. If (probably) crappy hardware with Windows works for them – who am I to judge?

Despite that, the Get a Mac ads from Apple are more conciliabe, meaning they acknowledge the strengths of the PC to some degree, even if in a comical way. Laptop Hunters is a more offensive and absolutistic approach to compare the two systems, telling the customers Apple is stealing money from them. That’s business, OK, but it’s totally unfair.

See here:

Paul builds up a RAID consisting of 24 Samsung SSDs, ~250GB capacity each, which leads us to a total capacity of 6TB. Parallelizing IO with so much disks which are fast each on its own, this really gives a boost…

Thanks, Klaus!

Thanks, Volker!

A is for Atom from JP Sykes on Vimeo

via Jon Skyes.