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A new IM for the iPhone is out - Fring. It even allows to make calls using Skype - great! Unfortunately I used a very poor password (no, it's not test123) because I was to lazy to type and remember something long when I signed up on the phone. Can change it later anyways. Can I? At least the iPhone client does not offer any way to change the password. The Web site does not offer anything. The support wrote me:

Unfortunately, it is not possible to change the password you registered with.
We apologize for the inconvenience.

If you are not satisfied with the password you used, we suggest opening a new account.

Not very smart... so I stopped using the application - if I cannot change my password to protect my account, what else will not work?

Labels: english, iphone, rant, web

Maybe this works better than the Viennese initiative which does not explicitly talk to the dogs...

Seen in Boston, MA.

Labels: english, fun, travel

Wow - check out these amazing pictures of The Sun.

Labels: art, english

Happy Foto ist ein qualitativ sehr guter Anbieter von Online-Ausarbeitungen welcher (als Ausnahme am Markt!) auch eine Mac-Version seiner Software anbietet. An sich wirklich sehr löblich nicht nur auf Windows-User zu schauen. Leider lässt sich diese Software auf meinem System aber nicht starten - in /var/log/system.log wird nur folgendes ausgegeben:

2008-10-21 10:28:01.810 HappyFoto-Designer 1.0[12134:10b] -DCI_USE_SETCURRENTCONTEXT_NIL=0
2008-10-21 10:28:01.811 HappyFoto-Designer 1.0[12134:10b] -DCI_WORKAROUND_CICONTEXT_MAPTABLE=1
2008-10-21 10:28:01.811 HappyFoto-Designer 1.0[12134:10b] -DCI_WORKAROUND_CICONTEXT_MAPTABLE_VIA_CG=0
2008-10-21 10:28:01.812 HappyFoto-Designer 1.0[12134:10b] -DCI_FORCE_SOFTWARE_RENDERER=0
2008-10-21 10:28:01.812 HappyFoto-Designer 1.0[12134:10b] -DCI_FORCE_SOFTWARE_RENDERER_VIA_ENV=0
2008-10-21 10:28:01.872 HappyFoto-Designer 1.0[12134:10b] Unable to load nib file: MainMenu, exiting

Sehr lästig, das Programm-Icon verschwindet nach rund 2 Sekunden wieder. Das wars. Keine Fehlermeldung für unerfahrene Benutzer. Grund ist laut Hotline die "ungewöhnliche" Spracheinstellung meines Systems - Englisch. Nun ja, ich verstehe ja, dass Happy Foto nicht alle Sprachen dieser Erde unterstützt, aber das Programm sollte zumindest in der Standardsprache Deutsch starten, falls keine Lokalisierung verfügbar ist.

Der Helpdesk konnte nicht weiterhelfen - "Umstellen auf Deutsch" ist aber nicht wirklich eine Option für mich. Hier also die Lösung für alle die den Terminal starten und bedienen können:

cd HappyFoto-Designer 1.0.app/Contents/Resources
cp -R German.lproj/ English.lproj

Das legt eine Kopie der deutschen Sprachdateien an und fortan startet der Happy Foto Designer für den Mac auch auf einem englischem System. Endlich ist der Happy, der Foto Designer!

Labels: deutsch, development, tech

Yesterday Apple announced a new MacBook and a new MacBook Pro. While the overall design and the attention to detail is again amazing and sets Apple apart from its competition, the event itself and the amount of buzz was... missing? different? wrong?

I remember a while ago when Apple announced the iPhone - speculations around the Blogsphere, lots of self-drawn images, buzz everywhere. Will they? Or won't they? What will be included? And finally Apple delivered an amazing phone, that still beats all of its competitors in terms of usability and design. But since then - a mess with MobileMe, unresolved security bugs and missing features. Apple seems to loose its buzz?

Murphy Mac writes:

If you were looking for the blockbuster announcement you were at the wrong event. If there is one, we’ll know about it some time in December, when the Macworld rumors start leaking. Personally, Murphy hopes Apple has something big, and that they manage to keep it under wraps until the keynote. It’s more fun that way.

I could not agree more - let's hope Apple finds back to its roots, keeps it promises and "shocks" us positively with new, amazing gadgets!

(Image from apple.com)

Labels: apple, english, mac, rant

Finally it gets the attention in the press it deserves:

The first concerns the iPhone's email application, which automatically downloads images within an e-mail, said Aviv Raff, a security researcher, on Thursday.
That's problematic because the image will refer back to a server-side script when it is downloaded, indicating to the sender that the e-mail has been opened and the e-mail address is valid. The address can then be spammed.

Apple already knew about this design flaw when they released the iPhone. Also I wrote the support several times about how to disable the loading of images but all I heard back (from both Apple and t-mobile) was that this feature is not available. The support person did not not confirm that this is a security issue or write back anything in particular about this problem.

It's the same problem (with Apple, not with the products!) that they don't listen to the community or bug reports - I also reported the SSL issue in MobileMe as a detailed bug report and through the support. The bug report was closed with "thanks, we don't confirm anything" and the tech support.... uhm... to be polite: was not very tech savy and said "SSL is not needed as MobileMe uses JavaScript and CSS"....

Grml. Why the heck don't they fix those issues and take more care about the security of their users data? Is Steve Jobs himself using MobileMe and exposing all his calendar data, business contacts and mails to the public? Would be interested to hear back from him... or is he not using his own service?

Read more about the iPhone security issues.

Labels: apple, mac, security

... hatte ich eine Stunde Verspätung, weil die Ladung noch ausbalanciert werden musste. Nun, beim Einsteigen habe ich folgendes fotografiert, da wundert mich nix mehr, dass wir so lange warten mussten, diese Fracht kann man ja nicht wie Koffer rumwerfen oder gar vergessen:


Für alle mit schlechten Augen - das ist ein niet-nagel-neuer, weisser Ferrari, der gerade in die 747 nach Boston verladen wird!

Labels: deutsch, fun, travel

A great conference is over! The Ajax Experience took place from Sept. 29 to Oct. 1 2008 in Boston and was packed with great talks - sometimes four of them in parallel! So it was very hard to decide between learning about security (beyond XSS and SQL injection!), the newest Ajax frameworks (i.e. Cappuccino - check out 280Slides, it's worth it!) or performance improvements (Steve Souders had great stuff again!).

So it's really hard to give a recap of what happened - so much things have been going on. One item I take for me as programmer is about how to improve my designs - it's all about CRAP.

• Contrast
• Repetition
• Alignment
• Proximity

A lot of different effects can be achieved by just focusing on these four items and that's one of the reasons why this Website is now a bit lighter than it was before the conference ;)

Another interesting session has been "Top 10 browser issues" with quirksmode.org creator ppk. On stage with him the persons behind the four major JavaScript frameworks Prototype (Andrew Dupont), Dojo, YUI and jQuery (John Resig).
This session was a pretty good overview about where the projects will be heading and what you can expect from them in the future - because in the end it depends on a single person...

Regarding performance improvements I want to highlight SmushIT.com, a new Web application (and a Firefox plugin) that automatically optimizes images for Web sites. Great, simple and just working. It's good to see new tools coming up that simplify tasks which had to be performed manually a year ago - another great sample is Hammerhead. Also note that Yahoo added 20 additional rules to their existing 14 "golden" performance rules.

Finally I wanna restate the sentence from the beginning of this post - "A great conference is over!". It gave a great overview about what is happening in the Web 2.0 world and fostered networking with other developers outside of the own company!

Labels: conference, english, tech, usa, web

Now that Google is 10 years old they offer to search within an index from 2001 (on a total of 1,326,920,000 pages). Try it on your own, have you been in their index back in 2001?



(via Heise)

Labels: english, fun, google, web

Apple pays around 70 cents in every dollar to the record labels, who then hand across nine cents to the music publishers who control the copyrights to the music.

No wonder that music is so expensive and that most people still try to download it for free... 60% of the money is paid to the big four! Music could be so much cheaper and lots more people would actually by it if it would be only around 40 cent per song....

Read the full story.

Labels: apple, english, music