Woopsie!!

Great work, myself.. My new blog was private!! I just changed this setting, so now it's public again.

Please try again - my new wordpress-blog is here (and public): http://luposlip.wordpress.com/

New blog!

From now on I'll update my blog at Wordpress instead of this one.

"Why" you ask - because I want to use TextMate for blogging, and blogger.com doesn't support the MetaBlog API (XML-RPC based) as the TextMate blogging bundle supports.

Please update your link, and visit: http://luposlip.wordpress.com

:-)

Apple bans "the A-word" (Android) from App Store

Crazy!

Apple bans "the A-word" from apps submitted to their appstore!:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/188696/apple_bans_the_word_android_from_app_store.html

Crazy, crazy I say! When will they censor out a book from iBooks, an article from New York Times or a website from being accessed by the iPad?

Read here for more of the same complaining:

http://luposlip.blogspot.com/2010/02/apple-ipad-hmm-not-with-total-drm.html

Which electric car will win?

I wonder which electric car will end up winning the title of my family's first electric car..

Will it be Tesla S - the coolest, biggest electric family car out there (but not available for the next couple of years):

http://www.teslamotors.com/models/index.php

Will it be the Renault Fluence Z.E., probably cheaper than the Tesla S but presumably not on market any earlier:

http://www.renault-ze.com/dk/#/dk/electric-cars-range/fluence-ze-concept-family-saloon-car.html

Or perhaps just the Mitsubish iMiEV as our second car - cheaper (though not exactly cheap), coming to Denmark next summer (2011) but much smaller:

http://www.mitsubishi-motors.com/special/ev/

Or a fourth I haven't considered yet?

Apple iPad - hmm... Not with total DRM control!

It took me a while. The first couple of days after the introduction of the iPad I felt a combination of disappointment and "yeah, but it'll be a nice tool for x, y and z".

The following link is a must read for nerds/geeks/techies:

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2010/01/29/tinkerers-sunset

Note: The text is (in my opinion) not just Apple-specific, but specific to all vendors of closed app stores!

I'm actually not sure anymore that I wan't the iPad.

I think it's ok that Apple makes the hard- AND software inside of my laptop. Because I've never had a PC that worked as good as the one I have now (an almost 2 years old MacBook Pro).

But if I use the iPad Apple will not only control the hard- and software, but also the content on it - through their iBooks bookstore and which newspapers they make deals with.

I'm not being paranoid here, but I just don't like it. It's alright as long as my OSX is a FreeBSD unix I can tweak and hack as I want. My iPhone can be jailbreaked, but I don't want to. It's "just" a phone. But a tablet PC shouldn't be DRM controlled..

I still think the iPad looks great, and it seems to be possible to view non-Apple approved .epub and .pdf ebooks on it. But it's just easier and "more sexy" to buy content through iTunes/iBooks. And if Apple don't wan't a certain book (or movie for that matter - ever tried to search for "deep throat" in the iTunes Movie store?), then it's just not possible to buy it.

In the future - who knows if New York Times is allowed to write critical articles "against" Apple? Will Apple filter the article away? Will they kick out NYT in the end?

An iPad would be a wonderful email/surfing/movie/eBook-reading tool. But it should be open, not DRM-closed and controlled by a single entity.

Developers - please read the link in the beginning of this post, it's mandatory! :-)

But you shouldn't read the first one, without also reading this one (until the end):

http://gizmodo.com/5461485/ipad-snivelers-put-up-or-shut-up?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+gizmodo%2Ffull+%28Gizmodo%29

Have a nice one.

Voice mail doesn't work after upgrading unlocked iPhone

Yesterday I upgraded my unlocked iPhone from version 2.2 to 2.2.1.
After the upgrade, the Voice Mail my Voice Mail configuration was reset - i.e. it didn't work anymore.

So just for reference - here is the guide on how to set the Voice Mail number on the iPhone (at least this work on a Danish iPhone, originally bought from Telia):

If your Voice Mail number is (+1) 123-1234, you should go to the Phone app, open up the dial tab, and type in the following:
*5005*86*+11231234#

Just for clarification, the template is:
*5005*86*[VOICE MAIL NUMBER INCL. +LANGUAGE CODE]#

And then press the Dial button. That's it! You'll probably have to do this after each upgrade.

Please comment if the template looks different for your country/original service provider!

VirtualBox 2.1.2 on OSX

Wow, I almost missed this one! VirtualBox 2.1.2 has been out for a week now, and I don't see it until now.

But this is the time for rejoice. An issue that's been bugging me for 4 months now (since 2.0.2) has been fixed! It was actually a pretty critical bug, in my opinion. The issue was that on OSX hosts (which uses a journalising file system) a sudden loss of power might render the windows guest OS unbootable! It took me some time to persuade everyone that this was actually a big issue. I saw it a day that I'd closed the lid on my Mac Book Pro, making it go into suspended mode. It was a friday afternoon and the battery had only about 5 percent left. During the weekend - in which I didn't use the Mac - the battery died, and my windows guest died. Reinstall "fest".

Looking in the changelog for 2.1.2 this is now fixed:

Mac OS X hosts: save the state of running or paused VMs when the host machine’s battery reaches critical level

This sounds as the exact issue I posted:
http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/2267

This is SOOO great, thanks for recognizing the issue Sun! :-)


Outlook and networking

Another note on the changes in 2.1.0 (yes, not the newest one): When using outlook I've seen that in earlier versions outlook took a long time connecting to our Exchange server via http. Since VirtualBox 2.1.0 this is no longer an issue. This makes my day.

iLife '09 first impressions

Today I got my copy of iLife '09 from the local Mac store on the way home from work.
I was especially keen on getting my hands dirty using the new face detection and recognition feature of iPhoto 8 (='09). Secondarily I looked forward into trying the new stabilizing feature of iMovie.

After installing the bundle I booted up iPhoto. It immediately began to search for faces in my about 5000 local photos. It took about 40-45 minutes (dual cpu intel mac book pro).

Then it was my turn. I found the first photo containing faces, and labeled the first one. Then it immediately suggested a lot of other photos that might be of the same face. At first it was a bit imprecise. But after just labeling 2-4 different photos of a face, it actually got very precise! After no time (read about 20 minutes) I'd labeled about 20 faces in almost 1000 pictures. Amazing.

It happens like this: iPhoto suggest a lot of photos when you decide to confirm faces (by clicking a button). Then the suggested photos are shown, where you can either confirm or reject the faces as being of that person. It all goes pretty darn fast.

I actually believe this is the photo management application I've been looking for in years! I used to use Adobe Photo Album 2.0, then Picasa (both on PC) but when I shifted to Mac about 10 months ago I started using iPhoto. I wasn't totally amazed by it, it lacked the speed of Picasa (and Picasas way of easy sharing to picasaweb and geotagging). But now iPhoto supports it all, and more. It exports to mobileme (of course), flickr and facebook. And rocks.

When you've tagged a lot of photos for the same face, it seems to be a bit more reluctant at suggesting new untagged photos, which in my oppinion is a bit of a shame. It gets a bit too precise at this point, ignoring pictures that match the face and those just close. I'd prefer this face search algorithm to be a bit too optimistic, in contrast of being too pesimistic.

Perhaps Apple will fix this in the next fix? Well, it's not a bug at all, just a little nuisance.

Then onwards to the new features of iMovie. I just used it for 5 minutes. But in these 5 minutes I took a small video clip from a family birthday (just under 1 minutes long) which was quite jerky on the stability side. In the 5 minutes before I started writing this blog, I succeeded in applying a theme for it (nice themes they've added!). A theme is a title, transitions and an end effect. Furthermore I added stability to the clip, virtually removing all jerkiness from the clip!

The way iMovie removes jerkiness is of course by zooming in at certain points. But you have full control over the maximum allowed zooming level so you won't loose important details.

I'm impressed. iLife ´09 is a bargain!

I can't help digging deeper into the new features (including green-screen filming and composition of iMovie, learning to play my synth in GarageBand and getting all my older photos imported into iPhoto. iPhoto is definitely my primary (and only) photo management app from now on!

Go fetch.

iPhone 3G and heavy rain

Woopsie! A couple of days ago I came home from the grocery store, and put my iPhone (3G) away outside, just while emptying the car. After doing this I forgot all about the phone, and after a short while it began to rain. Heavily.

It rained for about 30-40 minutes. After another 30 minutes I went out, and saw the iPhone facing up, covered with large drops of water.. :-[

I thought to myself "stupid, stupid, stupid". I went inside, dryed the phone. I couldn't see any visual damage (water/moisture behind the display glass, water inside the speaker, the home button etc.). I turned it on, and everything worked like a charm.

Now after a couple of days of use, I can say that absolutely nothing went wrong with the phone. It is absolutely as before the 30-minutes-of-heavy-rain-facing-up-test.

Well built Apple! :-)

VirtualBox 2.0 for OSX vs. Parallels Desktop

I know - it's been a long time since I've been blogging. There are new kids on the blog (tsk) that requires my attention. In more than one way that is.

And on to the point of this post..

I use OSX Leopard. Because of my work, I have to use Windows as well (for certain developer tools unavailable for OSX as well as Outlook).

Until recently I've used Parallels Desktop 3.0, because of the tight desktop integration compared to VMWare Fusion.

But the last couple of weeks I've used VirtualBox 1.6.4. The only thing I've had against VirtualBox during this period was the lack of host interface networking (bridged networking). This is a feature that has been present in the Windows, solaris and Linux versions, but not OSX (I need it because of some local servers on our network, on which I've needed to access LAN-only ports).

With VirtualBox 2.0 this is no longer a problem for OSX hosts - VirtualBox 2.0.0 supports host interface/bridged networking for OSX hosts! :-)

So I can only recommend VirtualBox for current Parallels Desktop/VMWare Fusion users! VirtualBox is free (as in free beer), and new features/bugfixes are coming up fast.

There are still a few things I miss from Parallels Desktop, but not enough to make me consider re-installing Parallels:

1. The possibility to have the Windows taskbar present in all Spaces in seamless mode
2. The possibility to have (selected) Windows applications appear in the Dock
3. The possiblity to use CMD-TAB to be able to tab between open OSX applications, without having to press the "host" button first (which per default is also the CMD key)
4. This is almost the same request as the above: The ability to switch between Spaces using a CMD-based shortcut, without having to press the "host" button first.

The two last points could perhaps be merged to a feature, that makes it possible to use certain (selected?) OSX only keyboard shortcuts/gestures - if they aren't used in the virtualized operating system, without having to "uncapture" the keyboard and/or mouse first.

Congratulations Sun - VirtualBox is truly an amazing Open Source offer, on par with the best commercial products. Where VirtualBox lacks minor nice-to-haves, VirtualBox seems significantly faster than - at least - Parallels Desktop 3.0. For most personal/business users this is much more important than a couple of nice-to-haves. Including myself ;)

No matter if you are using Windows, Linux, OpenSolaris or Mac OSX as your host operating system - go ahead: Use VirtualBox for your virtualization needs (and please comment if you don't agree, have additional facts or else you want to share).

UPDATE:
Another feature would be nice to have: Drag-and-drop between the virtualized and host desktops.