SteveX Compiled

I downloaded a trial of iWork '09 from Apple today to check out some of the new stuff. I run a utility called Little Snitch that tells me when apps I'm running make network connections, so I watched Pages's interaction with the outside world the first time I ran it.

When you enable the free trial, it sends your registration information to littlebuddy.apple.com. Nice innocuous sounding name, no?

From there it goes to configuration.apple.com, metrics.apple.com, and then the last one it connected to surprised me: ad.doubleclick.net. DoubleClick is a well-known online advertising company.

It only did the doubleclick connection the first time I ran it, but maybe that's an occasional thing. But I can't think of any reason for Pages to be connecting to DoubleClick.

First Obama's Twitter Account, now this:

9:31 am Randy: Let's see some editing.
9:31 am Very hard to show this stuff in a slide, so here's a demo. Randy Ubillos - chief architect of video applications.
9:31 am 4CHAN.ORG /G/URUS FOR THE F**KING WIN
9:30 am Oh, wait, sorry, Steve did die. Our condolences.
9:30 am Precision editor, advanced drag & drop, maps (2D and 3D) in your movies.
9:30 am HTTP://M.ATTHEW.NET
9:30 am What's in iMovie '09?
9:29 am SEX ME
9:28 am iMovie '09
9:28 am That's iPhoto '09.
9:28 am Places can show a map with all photos taken in the specific area.
9:27 am Steve did not die.
9:27 am Retraction on Steve Jobs comment...we don't know how that got in our feed.
9:26 am Showing a "pumpkin patch" event with no geotag. Starts typing name, and iPhoto assists using its database of locations.
9:25 am Hovering over a pin at Aspen. Click an arrow and go straight to all Aspen photos, even across multiple events.
9:24 am STEVE JOBS JUST DIED :
9:24 am Now demoing Places.
9:24 am Can also group people in sidebar...smart albums. Showing "Our Family"...automatically contains and updates all members of the family.

That's a snippet of the live coverage from MacRumors. It went offline shortly after this.

So after playing Little Big Planet for a while, I earned some trophies. I went to visit Playstation Home to see if I could put them in my house or something. But alas, there's an update for Playstation Home available.

It's been updating for 10 minutes now and it's at 57%.

I bought LittleBigPlanet for the PS3 about a half hour ago. I'd be playing it, but it's updating. And it's about 55% done.

I don't know how the Xbox 360 does it, but it's not uncommon for games to get updated, and the updates are always just a few seconds. I'd speculate that the Xbox 360's OS has some built-in dynamic patching mechanism, where the PS3 has to replace entire files. Or something like that. But it's something that the Xbox clearly does better.

Another thing the Xbox 360 does better is background downloading. On the PS3, if I download a game or demo in the background, it seems like what it actually downloads is some sort of installer, that I then have to go and run in order to play the game. Of course I can't install it in the background, so I end up waiting while it installs.

On the Xbox 360, if I download something in the background, when the download is done, it's ready to use. No waiting.

I picked up an Acer Aspire One netbook for my wife for Christmas. It makes a pretty good couch and travelling computer simply because it's so small, and so inexpensive. The one I picked up has 512mb of RAM, 8gb of SSD, and runs Linux (Linpus).

I got it refurbished, and I guess the previous owner had done something to the OS that made the wireless flakey. On boot, it'd get a connection just fine, but if I closed it and reopened it, when the system woke from sleep, the wireless would never come back. The UI would show the SSIDs in the area, but not actually connect to any of them.

I contacted Acer support and they suggested I use the recovery DVD to restore it to its factory default state. This seemed like a cop-out on their part, but I gave it a shot as it was really the only way to get to the next step in the support process, and lo and behold, it worked. The 802.11g UI is different, and it recovers from sleep just fine.

My reason for posting this is a little tip. The restore software comes on a DVD, and of course the netbook itself has no DVD drive. They suggest you either connect an optical DVD drive via USB (I don't have an optical drive with a USB connection), or boot the DVD and the bootable OS and software on it will let you write a bootable image onto a USB stick.

I wanted to use that second option, but I didn't really trust booting the recovery DVD on my MacBook Pro, so I used VMWare. Fire up VMWare Workstation, create a new virtual PC, set it to boot off the disc in the physical DVD drive, and tell it to start. VMWare boots the DVD. Plug in the USB stick before it finishes booting, so the OS that boots off the DVD will see it, and it will let you write a bootable recovery image onto the USB stick.

Start the AA1 with the USB stick plugged in, hit F12 and pick the USB stick as the boot device, and off it goes.

Overall I'm fairly impressed with the Aspire One, for the price. If it was $499 (which I think is what the higher end version with more RAM, a hard disk and Windows XP goes for) I wouldn't be so happy with it, but I got it for $198, and for that price, it's excellent.

Bandwidth is both expensive and cheap. It's cheap at a lot of hosts and for a lot of consumers, because providers expect we're not going to use what we're allocated, and yet expensive when purchased in bulk, where the assumption must be that it will all be used.

Every time I hear about how expensive it is to run a successful podcast (like the NPR podcasts, some of which are begging for money to pay for $150k annual bandwidth bills), I think to myself, "I have spare bandwidth; I'd like to donate some". But there's no mechanism for me to do that.

And why not? I don't think it would be that hard to do. Let's take a rough cut at it.

The goal is for a provider to be able to share a particular piece of content, say a podcast, with as many people as possible, and accept donated bandwidth for distributing it.

One possibility is BitTorrent, which does a fairly good job of this, but would require a custom client. The biggest podcast client in the world is iTunes, and it doesn't support BitTorrent, so any podcast that doesn't want to lose most of its audience will stick with HTTP as the distribution protocol. We need a way of distributing URLs that will load balance to the donated bandwidth.

As a donator, here's what I want to be able to do: Go to, say, the NPR website, and click on the "donate bandwidth" link. At this link I'd enter the URL for my Bandwidth Donation Protocol (BDP) service, the amount of bandwidth I want to donate (in megabytes or gigabytes) and a key or password. NPR's service would then add me to it's bandwidth donator pool.

Now when they have a podcast they want to post, they generate a URL for that podcast. Say it's:

Before using my donated bandwidth, they need to upload the content to me. Their server contacts my server and says "here's hypotheticalpodcast.mp3, and I'd like you to allocate 1 gigabyte worth of bandwidth to it". In return, my server would generate, say, 200 unique URLs and return them to NPR. Now for the next 200 requests for this content, they can 301 redirect to my URLs and distribute the content at no cost to them.

Why generate the 200 URLs? Why not just use the same URL and stop answering after 200 requests? Because a single user downloading content might request the URL more than once (for example, picking up ranges of content), so the URL can cut off after a reasonable amount of time, but not be vulnerable to abuse by giving out the URL 500 times when only authorized to do so 200 times.

I've wanted to implement something like this for years but never had the time, so I'm throwing it out there: What do you think? Would it work? Would it help the podcasters being crushed by their own success?

Months ago I installed a player for some DRM'ed media from Hiro Media, which was having a noticeable impact on my system. I caught their daemon running in the background consuming ~10% of my CPU when I wasn't watching any video. I couldn't find any info on how to get rid of it, and after they didn't answer my email requesting some information on how to uninstall it, I went and found the process, renamed it, killed it. It didn't come back.

Today, I was having a look at /var/log/system.log (which you can see through the Console app or just via tail /var/log/system.log in a Terminal window) and I noticed this:

Dec 28 09:04:10 stevemac com.apple.launchd[213] (com.hiro.Daemon): Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds
Dec 28 09:04:20 stevemac com.apple.launchd[213] (com.hiro.Daemon[33542]): posix_spawnp("/usr/libexec/HiroMedia/HiroDaemon", ...): No such file or directory
Dec 28 09:04:20 stevemac com.apple.launchd[213] (com.hiro.Daemon[33542]): Exited with exit code: 1
Dec 28 09:04:20 stevemac com.apple.launchd[213] (com.hiro.Daemon): Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds
Dec 28 09:04:30 stevemac com.apple.launchd[213] (com.hiro.Daemon[33545]): posix_spawnp("/usr/libexec/HiroMedia/HiroDaemon", ...): No such file or directory
Dec 28 09:04:30 stevemac com.apple.launchd[213] (com.hiro.Daemon[33545]): Exited with exit code: 1
Dec 28 09:04:30 stevemac com.apple.launchd[213] (com.hiro.Daemon): Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds

So this thing has been trying to launch every 10 seconds for months now. Time to do something about that.
After a bit of digging I discovered launchctl, the unified launch control tool for the Mac. In a Terminal window, run launchctl, and you get a launchd% prompt:

launchd% help

launchd%

Getting rid of this evil daemon:

launchd% stop com.hiro.Daemon
launchd% remove com.hiro.Daemon

And behold, the launching stopped.

Oil is down to $32/barrel, from a high of something like $140/barrel. What happened?
I did some reading a few months ago on the price of oil, and came to the conclusion that nobody really knows exactly why the price of oil ends up where it does. Things that you think would change it don't seem to change it, but sometimes what seem like small causes have huge effects on the price of oil.

Now, I'm not qualified to offer any expert advise, so this post is for entertainment purposes only. But here's my theory.

A few months back, speculators were bidding on the price of oil futures. In September, they were buying December's oil. There's a fixed capacity for producing oil, which can be changed but only slowly, and there were far more speculators bidding on the price of oil than there was actually oil available to buy, so the price went up way beyond where it would have naturally settled if there were unlimited supply.

But the speculators bid on more oil than the world actually needed. The oil companies said "hey you want to buy a barrel of oil in December for $120? Sure!". The speculators did this because they expected that the demand would be there and they'd be able to unload that barrel of oil for more than they paid for it.

But then demand destruction kicked in. Demand for oil dropped because it was so expensive that it started to cause people to changing their habits. It didn't have to change much - only a few percent - for the pendulum to swing from not enough to excess.

An analogy: If there are 10 people, and 9 available doses of a drug that they all must have, each will bid higher until one drops out, and the rest will pay that high price. If there are 8 people who want the drug, it will sell for much less because there's a surplus. Demand didn't have to change much to effect a huge swing in the price.

It didn't take much for the price of oil to go from $140 to $32, and in my opinion, it won't take much for it to go back up. I wouldn't trade the Prius in for a Hummer just yet.

I was waiting in line at a Wal-Mart tonight when I noticed that by the checkout line there were a variety of rolls of 35mm film near the cash register. People still use those?

I can understand having some in the store somewhere, probably with the VHS tapes and blank floppy disks, but the cash register aisle is prime real estate. On the other hand, Wal-Mart is a master merchandiser, so either they're there because they sell, or because Kodak is paying them good money to put them there.

I wonder which it is.

The film I was looking at was $9 for 3 rolls of film. Developing those 3 rolls of film is probably another $10/roll, so someone buying that item is spending $39 on film and prints. Digital cameras give you the freedom to take lots of pictures and delete the ones you don't like, so even if the cost of prints is the same (and I don't think it is), film would still be a waste of money.

I guess there are old school camera users out there who take so few pictures that a roll lasts them a year or two and then they get prints and put most of them in an album. For those folks maybe it doesn't make sense to upgrade. But I haven't seen one of these people out on the streets with a camera in years. Look around; it's a digital camera world. It's hard to believe there are that many people using film cameras in 2008.

Which would mean that it's Kodak paying for the shelf space for their film. Why would Kodak do that?

Not many companies show a straight downward trend on the 10 year chart. Maybe they're having a hard time letting go.

Wow, I haven't blogged much lately have I? Must be the Christmas season.
I'm a little disappointed that Google hasn't done a better job indexing the recipes.stevex.net site. I actually got into the habit of adding "stevex" to searches when I search for recipes. For example, Googling for baked french fries stevex. But look at the results for that search:

That first result doesn't have the word 'stevex' anywhere on the page. Why is that at the top of the results? I've seen Google do this for other queries as well, and I don't like it. If I've added a word to my search string, it's because I want pages that contain it.

But another problem is that the two results it did find on my site are old, old links to pages you haven't been able to get to through any links on the site for months. When I first put the site up, I didn't have a search engine, so I included some lame static links to all the pages to help the search engines find them. I've removed them, but they're still what Google prefers to find.

And, most importantly, Google didn't find the best result for that search: An actual recipe for baked french fries.

One of my goals over the Christmas break is to check in with Google's Webmaster Tools and see if there isn't some way I can help them do a better job with my site.

(Yahoo doesn't do much better, Windows Live Search doesn't either, though neither of them skips a keyword).