1) McCain says we need to fix the system. I agree!
2) McCain says we need a President who will veto bills like this with pork in it. I agree!
3) McCain says “well I voted for this bill because of the economic disaster and had to ignore the pork, this time around”
so in other words:
1) McCain fails to pass his own test for President
2) Do as I say, not as I do.
in summary:
“You need a President that will do what I would not do”
Now Obama was no better. Both had to vote for this bill or it would have been a political disaster for whomever had voted for it.
However, McCain would have impressed me much more had he actually been a Maverick and showed some political cajones instead of passing the buck to Bush, whom he knows will sign this bill, even with NASCAR race track support in it.
More of the same. There will be no change in Washington.
Do facts, figures and policies matter to you? When electing someone do you want someone with answers, any answers, or a master in the non-answer?
Over the last few days, I’ve been pointing out examples of non-answers. I’ve had to because my jaw drops each and every time one of these pops up on the internet. The bit of information I found today is an article by an Alaskan Republican who has debated Gov. Palin over two dozen times.
“Andrew, I watch you at these debates with no notes, no papers, and yet when asked questions, you spout off facts, figures, and policies, and I’m amazed. But then I look out into the audience and I ask myself, ‘Does any of this really matter?’ ” Palin said.
Really. She questions whether any of you are interested in facts, figures or policies. Really.
When you watch the debate tonight, listen for answers. I know I will be.
Gov. Sarah Palin drew a blank when asked by Katie Couric to name any decisions by the United States Supreme Court that she disagreed with, beyond Roe v. Wade.
“Hmmm,” she said after a brief silence. “Well, let’s see. There’s, of course in the great history of America there have been rulings, that’s never going to be absolute consensus by every American. And there are those issues, again, like Roe v. Wade, where I believe are best held on a state level and addressed there. So you know, going through the history of America, there would be others but …”
In other words, Gov. Palin has no clue. No idea of one other judgement she might be against. Not a one.
Shouldn’t someone who is running for Vice President be versed in our court’s history?
I guess not when it comes to Gov. Palin. She is only versed in her religion, forcing her religious views onto others (hence the strong opposition to RvW, and insisting teaching abstinence only. We know how well that worked out) and not the great history of this country.
“There would be others but…” What? Any jackass can make that statement.
Gov. Palin’s pagentry skills have taught her well the art of political double speak.
How about if she just answers a question for a change?
Put your country first - Listen to what candidates have to say and if you still like Gov. Palin, write her and tell her to start answering questions. The rest of us are listening.
Any development endeavor is a risk. Will I choose the right feature sets? Will the design be appealing? Will I deliver it to market on time? How will I find customers? How will I secure my software? How will I do billing?
Every developer has these and a thousand other questions. Apple’s iPhone App store presents a wonderful marketplace for developers. Write your application and Apple takes care of getting eyeballs onto your application. They take care of the distribution. They take care of reviews management. They take care of billing. They only take 30% which I find very fair.
But then Apple also has the Big Stick of Rejection. Apple has wielded the BSOR several times. Once for a thousand dollar scam. Once for a application that didn’t follow the AT&T contractual obligations. Then Apple started getting unfair.
Apple rejected a comic book application due to content. Really? Censorship? What if the contents of my application do not appeal to some reviewer at Apple? Am I supposed to put the sweat, blood and tears into a product only after the fact to learn I’d been banned from the library?
Apple rejected an application because it duplicated functionality. Many applications duplicate functionality, but maybe Apple saw Podcaster as duplicating potentially revenue generating functionality. The reason does not matter, Apple told someone who had baked the pie that their cake was not welcome. Apple already had some Lemon Merengue.
The App Store is as much a library as it is a market place. There are free applications as well as for sale applications. There is content masked as applications simply because that is the delivery medium.
The most bothersome issue as a developer is trying to figure out how to limit the risks imposed by Apple.
Should I submit a slide-show application which merely shows some screenshots of what I’d like to do? I can submit applications without pushing them live to the store, so should I submit a plan before I develop?
If I do this, is my intellectual property at risk? Will Apple just become pissed off at me and reject everything I submit?
I have decided that if Apple is going to wield a Big Stick of Rejection, then Apple should institute a formal submission process for allowing developers to determine if developing an application is even worthwhile. Sure this will mean more work for Apple, much slower time to market for applications and likely fewer applications, especially the thousands of free applications.
Or Apple could just accept applications, put the stick away and separate the Apple business model from the App Store business model.
Let the market decide if the developer did something worthy of income. Then everyone wins.
From The NY Times in Oct/2007 Republican Debate, McCain talking about Mitt Romney:
“I am prepared. I am prepared. I need no on-the-job training.
I wasn’t a mayor for a short period of time. I wasn’t a governor for a short period of time. For 20-some years, including leading the largest squadron in the United States Navy, I led. I didn’t manage for profit, I led for patriotism.”
Well gee, Senator, it is nice that you picked someone with those exact qualifications to fill your shoes should something disastrous happen to you.
Tonight marked a great milestone in our guild, the Bloodhoof Brigands. We’re a casual raiding guild and our Group One Raiding group downed Netherspite for the first time!
This was a big step for us as while the fight is not hard from a gear standpoint, it does require a lot of team coordination. Two tanks have to swap beam duty, four others have to share blue beam duty, all the while we damage Netherspite, avoid her breath of doom™ and keep everyone healed and alive.
Well done Group One!
Here is a kill photo. I’m the orc on the far right
Google announced a new open-source browser, Chrome
The introduction is done as a comic - Well worth anyone’s read, and understandable too.
First off, I just switched to Firefox to try it out, and I am a Safari fan as well. The first “ah-ha!” with Chrome is that it is multi-processed. This means for each document, there is a separate OS process. A process is akin to an Application, but you (probably) won’t see a new dock icon for each document, aka Windows.
What this means is that when a web page locks up or slows down, the rest of your pages won’t. Even better, should one of the web pages cause the “browser” to crash, you won’t lose every page, only the offending one!
I know people at PMUG have heard me complain about this for years.
I hear Chrome is Windows only at the moment, but also that it is a based on WebKit (Safari’s engine). Interesting
As my friends know, I am a big Safari fan. Safari 3 is fine and 4 promises even faster performance.
I like that Safari keeps all of my web passwords in the keychain, and those keychains and bookmarks can be synced by Mobile Me.
However, the bookmark syncing sometimes fails, and Mobile Me costs $99 a year.
Firefox is massively popular and with version 3 now looks more like a Mac OS X application.
1passwd
However it still stores passwords in it’s own format.
Enter 1passwd. This $35 gem is something every Mac user should own.
1Passwd does the following things for you:
Generates secure passwords
Saves those passwords in your keychain (either your default or a specified keychain)
Saves off identities (like who you are) for easy form filling (more accurate than saving forms)
Saves off credit card info (also encrypted in the keychain)
Remembers forms
Ok that is fine, but I have that already, you might thing. But check this out:
1Passwd works in Safari
1Passwd works in Firefox
1Passwd syncs and works with your iPhone (via their own Webkit browser)
Hold the presses here! I can use safari, generate a password, store the login form, then switch to Firefox and use the same forms and passwords there!
This one fantastic little application has allowed me to finally try out Firefox.
Initial Impressions
Firefox does seem very fast and stable. I’ve had one crash and the crash reporter popped up to let me give more data about what happened. I believe it was a 1passwd issue, but in 4 days of browsing that is not bad.
I kept trying to press the space bar to pop up menus in forms, but you have to use control-down arrow. Not a big deal.
Extensions
Firefox supports some awesome extensions, which don’t need to be hacked in like with Safari. Adblock is awesome, as is Firebug for developers.
Bookmarks
For bookmark syncing, there is a free site called Foxmarks. Foxmarks will sync your bookmarks between all of your firefox browsers. You do have to trust them with your bookmarks, but I never bookmark anything serious anyway. Install the Foxmarks extension, create an account, and off you go. The syncing is very fast, unlike Mobile Me syncing.
The Firefox 3 bookmark editor is much nicer than it was in previous versions. I think it is actually usable.
Also nice are the smart bookmarks, which track things such as your most visited sites, or recently bookmarked.
You can also add tags to Firefox bookmarks, then make smart bookmark folder or search on those tags. Why hasn’t Apple done this? This smacks of Spotlight searching.
Zooming
Hold down the control key and mouse wheel scroll, the web page will zoom in and out. I wonder if I can disable this, because I use control as my key for Ventrilo voice chat, and while chatting and scrolling pages, Firefox zooms. Oops.
Themes
Firefox has themes which allows you to choose how the browser controls look. I don’t find myself using this but obviously many people love it!
Summary
Regardless of which browser you use, check out 1passwd. It will help you generate much more secure passwords for every site you visit. They even have a service to back up your passwords, if you trust them.
Give Firefox + Foxmarks a try. You might like what you see.
Yes! I bought TextExpander awhile ago and liked it a lot, but eventually ditched it for Type It 4 Me, due to the speed issues with the TextExpander menu.
TI4M is fine, but TextExpander’s preferences and shortcut setup is nicer. SmileOnMyMac, TextExpander’s publisher, is also very Portland Macintosh Users Group friendly, so I like supporting them.
My recent issue with my laptop forced me to try Time Machine over a wireless network to the Airport Extreme N.
This has been working fine, but I wanted to see if I could eek out even better performance.
Thus, I dedicated the Airport Extreme N to a 5ghz N only network. I then set up my older Linksys WRT54G in bridge mode to serve the 802.11b and 802.11g clients.
So far, the results have been fantastic. I don’t have hard numbers, but streaming movies to Apple TV is near instant now. Backing up to Time Machine seems to be doing 10-12MB/second, based on watching the menu.
Small transfers still seem to suffer, but this is not much different than with a local drive filesystem. Large files always have much more throughput than a lot of little files.
Screen Sharing is screaming fast now, with live dragging showing almost no artifacts.
So if you have an Airport Extreme N and are still using older wifi devices (TiVo, PS3, Wii, older computers), consider breaking out an older router and using it as a wireless access point (WAP) and dedicate that fancy router to those clients who can really use it.
As some of you may have read in a recent post, I pondered the quality of Apple products of late.
As fate would have it, my MacBook Pro shot fire this morning. Two small flashes of yellow above the F4 key, accompanied by a “zit” noise and the machine powering off.
I called AppleCare and they immediately bumped me up two tiers - they don’t like the sound of fire.
They immediately asked if I was ok. yes. They asked if I had been injured. No. They asked if the fire department or insurance came. No.
After checking the battery, which was fine, we determined something on the motherboard, maybe a capacitor blew out.
I took it to the Apple Store and the awesome assistant manager Matt not only popped the machine right away to confirm that there had indeed been an incident, they replaced the machine right out without me even asking for such.
So I brought the machine home and restored via migration assistant from my Time Machine backup as of yesterday, which appears to have gone well. I had to reinstall XCode, but that’s because I did not want to use the full system restore. Start fresh.
They also offered to replace both of my power adaptors, just to be safe.
Excellent service indeed, no argument there.
However, sadly, more evidence that there may be something amiss in this round of quality control.
This machine is a newer revision of the same laptop, with a 40gb larger hard disk, so we’ll see if it behaves better in the year to come!
Thanks again to everyone at the Apple Store and at AppleCare - Excellent service!
Mix ‘n Match allows you to mix up different hair, eyes and mouths by sliding the sections of the face left or right.
While the lite version only includes three faces, the full version will contain many more, allow you to use your own photos as well as save your creations!
So this spring Elizabeth lost her Verizon phone. She could have used an old phone, but decided that since she wanted a new iPhone coming in June, she’d go ahead and switch to AT&T.
Went in, told them our plans and asked if signing up now or getting a phone would screw us in June when the new phones came out. “No,” was the response.
Lies.
Went today at 9am to get a phone at Washington Square. The Apple Store was already open and we were 5th in line, sweet!
After 15 minutes in line, it’s our turn. They bring out a 16gb white phone, but it won’t authorize.
So they try another one, then the nice Apple employee informs us that AT&T says she is not eligible for the cheaper, subsidized price until October, 2009.
He tried to call AT&T, as he said this is happening a lot, but they are closed on Sundays.
So we left. The iPhone is not worth an extra $200 to her.
We spent $100 of that on the way home at Home Depot and IKEA. Apple’s loss.
We’ll see what AT&T has to say tomorrow, as the store really did a bait-n-switch. Sure, we can get a phone, but if we had known it was going to cost us $200 more, we’d have waited to switch, waited to pay AT&T for months of service, waited entirely.
