Rick's World

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There's been a lot of talk about Leopard lately. This is the new version of OS X that will be released shortly for Apple's Macintosh computers. Apple announced months ago that it would be available in October. They just never said what day in October. Well, now it's October and the rumors all point to October 26th as the release date for it. This date makes sense, since it's the last Friday of the month. This gives them as much time as possible to finish it up and get it out to the stores and still make their October deadline.

The problem is that there's been no official word from Apple on any release date, nor has there been any word on the Apple Developer Connection web site as to the availability of any Release Candidates or a Gold Master. I've been a paid member of the ADC Select program for a few months now. I've had access to all the previous betas of Leopard, but I have yet to see the final version show up on their site. If they are going to release it on October 26th (only 17 days from now), they would have to have it out to the CD duplicating companies a couple weeks early, in order to make up the no doubt millions of copies they are going to need at release time.

I

suspect that Apple has already finished Leopard and is just keeping quiet about it as they prepare all the CDs and packaging and ship them out to the stores. I'm not really that surprised that it's not available on the ADC site. I would expect they are purposely withholding it, so that noone can get their hands on it before the release date. I also wouldn't be surprised if they withheld certain features from the betas that will finally show up in the release version. I just hope that if it does release in the stores on October 26th, that they make it available that same day on the ADC site for all us legal developers to download. I did, after all pay to get a legal copy of the final shipping version of Leopard. I want to have it the same day all the other 'paying' people get it in the stores.

I'm debating whether I will buy a copy in the stores on the day it comes out. I have two Macs at home - a MacPro and an old PowerPC based Mac Mini that I use as a server. The ADC membership entitles you to one copy of Leopard. That would be the copy that goes on my MacPro. That little Mini would need it's own copy, so I may just go out and buy a copy anyway for the Mini. Once I get that copy for the Mini, I'll likely just install it on the MacPro and then upgrade the Mini once my 'official' copy arrives. I've even been toying with the idea of buying my brother's Intel based Mac Mini. He wants to upgrade that to a Macbook Pro, and I may be able to use his old Mini as a small home server. Maybe I'll keep the old PowerPC based MacMini as a testbed for testing Universal binaries on the older PowerPC architecture. If I do this, then I'd need to get the more expensive 'family pack' since I'd be buying two copies of Leopard in addition to my 'free' copy. I'm not sure about this though.

Why is it that on the iPod Touch, there is no way to search for a song, artist, or album by typing the first few letters of the name? The newest iPod Classics have this, and I think the new iPod Nanos do too. Why not the iPod Touch? Yes, it 'only' holds 16GB of music compared to the up to 160GB in the iPod Classic, but come on now! 16GB is still a lot of music and what with the onscreen keyboard, there's no excuse. Get with the program Apple!

I've been hearing rumors that a new software update is coming soon for the iPod Touch/iPhone as soon as Leopard ships. Hopefully this feature will be added.

Ok, here's bug #2 that I've found on the iPod Touch.

One of the features the iPod Touch has is to automatically shut off the screen after a couple minutes to save power. When it does this, it locks the controls in the screen. In order to bring the controls back, one of the things you can do is double click the home button. This turns the screen back on, still locked, but displays controls on the screen that you can use to pause/continue, fast forward, rewind, and adjust the volume. The problem is, with these controls that come up on the locked screen, it seems like it's very hard to aim right and press those buttons so they respond. The buttons seem to work fine when it's unlocked. It's just these locked buttons that seem to not respond well.

Maybe I'm just imagining it, but they don't seem to respond right.

"An idle mind is the devil's workshop. And the devil's name is Alzheimer's."
- George Carlin

I couldn't agree more.

For as long as I can remember, I've always been a heavy reader. I'd read novels, I'd read magazines, I'd read articles on everything under the sun on the Internet. Why do I do it? Because I enjoy it, but also because I like to learn new things. I am not one of these kind of people who is perfectly content to do the same old stuff every day for the rest of your life. I'm always trying new things. I read about new programming languages. I read about new operating systems. I try new operating systems. (Hell, I tried OS X as an experiment, and now it's the only OS I use at home!). I studied how to play guitar. I'm studying how to play the piano. I'm studying the Spanish language trying to learn to become bilingual. Will I ever be a master guitarist or pianist? Probably not. Will I ever become fluent in Spanish? Maybe. Maybe Not. It's the effort that I enjoy. I love looking at musical notation and understanding what all those little lines, dots and squiggles mean. I love listening to people speaking in Spanish and actually understanding some of what they are saying.

I've long believed that you need to exercise your mind just as much as you need to exercise your muscles. If you don't exercise your muscles, they get weaker until they eventually atrophy and die. The same goes for your mind. If you don't exercise your mind, your mind gets weaker and eventually atrophies (Alzheimer's). This is especially true as you get older. I think this one one reason many old people develop Alzheimer's. They retire, and stop working. This means, they stop using their minds. Their minds atrophy and eventually it reaches the point of no return. I'm sure you've heard the stories of people in their 90s who still work and are still as sharp, mentally as ever. My father is 74, he still works, and he is a very intelligent guy. I intend to be another one of those 'annoying' old people who is still sharp as a tack in his old age. I don't intend to let my brain wither.

I wrote previously about how excited I was by the concept of the Amazon MP3 store. I loved the fact that they were selling high quality DRM-free MP3 files. Well, my excitement has decreased quite a bit. A couple days ago, I bought several songs from them and I have to say that the sound quality of these songs I purchased was very disappointing. I'd say that this was just bad luck in the track I downloaded, but I downloaded several and they all didn't sound very good. Granted, I haven't downloaded a lot of tracks from iTunes Plus (the DRM-free store on iTunes), but those sounded much better than these did. Maybe I'm spoiled by AAC. I don't know.

Has anyone else noticed this?

Ok, our friend the comment spammer has picked up the pace. Today he hit me with 217 comment spams, all in the course of an hour and a half. The comment spam all came from the IP:

62.33.12.24

Let's do a little bit of investigating of this.

We have several pieces of information to work with.

1. The IP address used to post the comment spam: 62.33.12.24
2. The DNS name of that IP address: dialup-24.pskov.ru
3. The User Agent used to send these comment spams (found in my server logs): "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"

These three pieces of information tell us a lot about our spammer.

First the IP address begins with '62.33.x.x'. This IP range is assigned to the country of Russia. Looking farther tells us that '62.33.12.x' is owned by domain 'pskov.ru'. The DNS name confirms this. This is actually the third IP address in the 62.33.12.x IP range that I've received spam from.

S

econd, we see the DNS name. The first part 'dialup-24' tells us that our spammer is connecting to the Internet through a dialup connection. In other words, our spammer is spamming the world using a 56K modem! In the DNS name, we also see 'pskov.ru', which is the domain he is connecting from. This is no doubt the name of his dialup Internet provider. This again is confirmed by looking up the information on the IP.

Third, we see the User Agent. The User Agent is the program that he used to send the comment spam. From the User Agent recording in my server logs, we see that this guy is sending the comment spams using Internet Explorer 6.0 (IE6.0) on Windows XP (Windows NT 5.1). This is unusual. Most 'professional' spammers use scripts to send the spams automatically in large batches. This User Agent tells us that our spammer is entering his spams manually, one by one! This guy wasted an hour and a half manually spamming my web site using Internet Explorer!

Based on the fact that this is the third IP that I've received from the same Internet provider in Russia, and that our spammer is dialing into the Internet leads me to believe that all three of these IP addresses are the same spammer. Since he's on dialup, that means that his ISP likely provides him an IP address using DHCP. This means that he could get a different IP every time he dials into the Internet. I had banned the last two IP addresses individually. Since it seems to be a pattern with this guy, I decided to ban the entire '62.33.12.x' IP range (his entire ISP, or at least a good chunk of it).

Banning Addresses

If you are running Apache as your web server, you ban IP addresses by adding some lines to a file named '.htaccess' (note the period as the first chracter). This file contains various commands to Apache on how to run your web site. Here is the code you would put in to ban this IP range:

order allow,deny deny from 62.33.12 allow from all

Note how there are only 3 numbers listed on that 'deny from' line? That means ban all IPs that start with those 3 numbers. This will ban 62.33.12.0 through 62.33.12.255. If you want to ban individual IP addresses, just add another 'deny from' line with the IP address you want. You can have as many 'deny from' lines as you want. Make sure you put all these 'deny from' lines between th e'order allow,deny' line and the 'allow from all'.

One less spammer harrassing me.

Here's the first bug I've encountered on the iPod Touch.

Whenever you sync new podcasts onto the iPod Touch, it displays a small blue dot next to the name of each podcast to indicate that it has unplayed podcasts. Once you've listened to the podcast, this blue dot goes away to indicate that it's been listened to.

Sometimes, this blue dot reappears on podcasts I've already listened to. I'm not sure why this is happening. I suspect it may happen when I turn the iPod Touch fully off. Maybe it doesn't save the played state of all songs to the flash memory when you shut it down. If not it should.

Once I figure out exactly what's happening with this, I'll post an update...

Yesterday, Amazon launched their new MP3 store. This is big news and I am very excited about the possibilities.

The interesting thing about the Amazon MP3 store is that all the tracks are stored in unprotected MP3 files! This means NO DRM! This is a VERY good thing. But what is even better is that their songs are cheaper than the iTunes DRM-free tracks. iTunes charges $1.29 for a DRM-free track, but Amazon charges $0.89-0.99 for their DRM-free tracks. Plus, Amazon has 2 million DRM-free tracks available. This means they have more DRM-free tracks available than iTunes does. The songs downloaded from the Amazon MP3 store are also automatically added to iTunes, so they can be easily added to your iPod. They also offer sales on certain CDs as prices much cheaper than iTunes.

While I generally like iTunes and the iTunes Plus section of the iTunes store, it's always good to see iTunes get some viable competition. You could make a very good argument that the iTunes Store is a monopoly in the purchasing of music online. The iPod is the only device that can play DRM protected songs, bought on iTunes. It also will NOT play DRM protected songs, bought on other online music stores. The only way to play songs on the iPod is to use a non-DRM file format. This means MP3, or in the case of iTunes Plus, this would mean unprotected AAC. In order for a company to sell songs that work on the iPod, they can't use DRM. This, no doubt is the only reason Amazon is selling unprotected MP3s and not highly protected WMA files, like everyone else has before. Amazon is at least smart enough to know that to complete with the iTunes Store, you need to work with the iPod. The only way to do this is to sell unprotected music.

This little bit of 'monopolistic' practices by Apple is actually forcing the industry in the right direction - away from DRM on music. People do not like that they don't own the song. With DRM, you could have the music you paid for taken away at any time. Without DRM, the song is yours and no company controls when or if you play it. This is a move in the consumers favor and I'm all for it.

I will definately be keeping an eye on how Amazon's MP3 store develops. I very much hope it is successful. If it is, it will likely force Apple to lower prices on the iTunes Store and also educate all the music labels that removing DRM from their songs is a good thing for everyone involved.

A week ago, I bought a 16GB iPod Touch. I meant to write a long fawning review praising this thing as an incredible device. I never got around to writing that blog. It's a good thing too. Now that I've spent a full week with it, I've had time to get a much more realistic opinion of it. Here are a few of my likes and dislikes about it.

The Good

• The screen: The screen on this thing is absolutely gorgeous. It's large, full color 320x480 screen is a joy to watch videos on and the album art looks positively huge on it. There have been some reports of problems with the screen on the iPod Touch, but I haven't noticed any problems on mine.
• Safari: The mobile browser on this thing is fantastic. It's the best mobile browser I've ever seen. I'm curious how you would program for it though. What screen resolution does it report? Is there any way to detect when the screen gets rotated between portrait and landscape mode.
• Onscreen keyboard: The onscreen keyboard is very well designed. It's also one of the 'smartest' keyboards I've ever seen. The keyboard adapts itself to whatever type of information you are entering. If you are entering an email address, it displays letters, an '@' symbol and even a '.com' button right on the main keyboard screen. If you are typing a company name into the Contacts, it knows to capitalize the beginning of every word automatically. If you double click on the space button, it inserts a period followed by a space. This is a great way to end a sentence and start a new one. If you are typing in a text field, and you hold your finger down on the text field for a few seconds, it will show you a 'magnifying glass' view of whatever area you run your finger over on the text field. Inside this magnified view, it shows you where the typing cursor will be as you move your finger. This makes it very easy to reposition the typing cursor, even on a small screen using a big 'stylus' (your finger.)
• Connecting to the PC: You no longer have to manually 'eject' the iPod from the computer. Just unplug it. If you are not syncing anything to it, you can unplug it at any time. This works beautifully on the Mac. I haven't tried it on the PC.
• Device construction: The iPod Touch has a surprisingly solid feel to it. It doesn't feel cheap. It's encased in metal with a nice, real glass screen, and it has a surprising weight to it, for a device as slim as it is.
• Storage capacity: I rather expected that I would have a lot of trouble living with 'only' 16GB on it, but I find that it's not really that big of an issue. Yes, if you put a large number of videos on it, it will eat the space fast, but if you limit it to just whatever music you like and whatever videos you are watching right now, it's plenty of space. I find that I use the iPod Touch to mostly listen to podcasts and music. Podcasts are a very 'transient' thing in that once you've listened to it, it no longer needs to be on your iPod, so they often don't stay on the iPod for very long - usually no more than a few days. As for music, by forcing you to limit your music selection to only the songs you like off of every album, it makes shuffling the music much easier. You don't even really need playlists. Just shuffle the whole thing and you'll still end up with lots of music you like.
• Contacts application: This application is very well designed and feels nicely 'Mac-ish'. It has lots of smooth animations from one screen to another, and it quite capable for creating, editing, and deleting contacts. The UI of it is very intuitive. I was easily able to make any change I wanted to a contact without any documentation. I certainly can't say the same for the confusing UIs on every other contact manager on the various cell phone's I've used.

The Bad

• No disk mode: There is no way to use this thing as a portable hard drive, as you could on the older iPods. It never even shows up on the Mac desktop at all when you plug it in. It only shows up in iTunes.
• VERY hard to hack: The previous iPods were very easy to hack into. The file formats of everything on the iPod had been long since reverse engineered and you could do just about anything you want with it. This thing is locked up as tight as a drum. From what I read, a lot about the file formats have changed, to include things such as hashes and other very difficult to crack changes. it's even considerably more locked down than the iPhone, of which it is otherwise nearly identical.
• No physical playback controls: There are only two buttons on the entire iPod - a 'Home' button that goes back to the main list of applications, and a 'sleep/off' button. There are no buttons to allow you to pause/play, fast forward, rewind, etc. a song. You have to actually click the controls on the screen to do this. The problem is, once you start playing a song, the screen will shut off to conserve power while you are listening. In order to get to the controls, you have to essentially double click the home button to turn the screen back on and display the controls. THEN you press whatever control you want. That means to pause the music, you need to press at least three buttons every time. This is an annoying feature. The old iPods where much easier. Just in the physical play/pause button.
• Wi-fi eats the battery: I've come to the conclusion that if you have the WiFi turned on, even if you are not using it, it eats the battery MUCH faster than if you turn the Wi-Fi off. I've even had cases where I pause a song, turn of the screen and walk away. I come back a while later, and despite the fact that it's been sitting there with the screen off, doing nothing, the battery has been drained considerably. My best guess is that since the WiFi was still on, it was still eating the battery trying to connect to a WiFi access point, even if I'm doing nothing else. if you want good battery life out of this thing, turn off the WiFi unless you need it. If you need the WiFi, turn it on just as long as you need it and then turn it back off (in the Settings). This should provide much better battery life. I will experiment with this and report back as to how much it seems to help, if any.
• Can't add Calendar items: It completely puzzles me why you have full access to create, edit and delete contacts, but you can only view calendar items. it makes no sense The iPhone can create calendar items, so why the hell can't the iPod Touch? It's the same application! This strikes me as a stupid attempt to differentiate the iPod Touch from the iPhone.
• No email application: The email application that was present on the iPhone is missing. While you could certainly make the argument that since the email requires a network connection, and the iPod Touch won't always be connected to a network, like the iPhone usually is, that the app is not necessary. Of course Safari also requires a network connection and it's on the iPod Touch, so that argument kind of falls apart. Stupid.
• No notes application: Yet another application from the iPhone that was removed from the iPod Touch for no apparent reason. Note that even on the iPhone there is no way to sync notes back to the computer, so even on the iPhone the Notes app is of little use. I wonder if this will change once Leopard is released. All in all, this mising feature is another stupid omission.
• No document reader application: The older iPods had a 'Notes' feature. This was a very primitive way to keep text notes on the iPod. You could then read these notes from the iPod at any time. There is no equivalent on the iPod Touch. This is a previous iPod feature that has gone entirely missing on the never version of the iPod. This makes no sense. What I had hoped they would do would be to design some simple way of syncing a list of PDF and Word documents onto the iPod Touch. Then all they would need is a very simple application that presents you with a list of the documents and lets you view them. The iPod Touch already has the ability to view PDF and Word documents loaded from a web page (and the iPhone can also do this from documents attached to emails.) It already can view the documents, so what's so hard about writing a simple program to show a list of documents and then pass the document onto it's existing document viewer? The iPod Touch (and the iPhone) would make gorgeous document readers.

All in all, I'm quite impressed with the iPod Touch. From a hardware point of view, it's downright beautiful (as is typical of Apple hardware design). As for software, it's mostly quite good, but has a few glaring things missing.

*sigh* These comment spammers are amateurs.

Note to comment spammers - if you use the same IP address to send all your comment spams you make it very easy to delete the spams and ban your IP. Today's winner is the IP address:

62.33.12.29

This guy sent 29 comment spams, all from this IP. The comment spam is deleted and his sorry ass is banned from my site.

Nice try moron.