Apple removing protective film from their store

I recently read an article on Engadget about how Apple is removing protective screens from their store.  There's a lot of sinister comments about how Apple is probably going to be making a competing product, or they are "censoring" products now... but I think the reality is much simpler; they are ugly. End of story.

How many times as one of your iPhone/Touch friends came up to you and said, "Hey, check out my new ultra kool iPhone...", and then they proceed to hand you a condom wrapped device with the plastic screen protector starting to fall off, or chipped around the edges....  Yeah... we've all been there.  And then when you pull out your Nexus One and show them, they give you this look like... "Well, try to imagine mine without the condom and screen protector that's starting to peel away... mine would look way cooler than yours then..."

Bottom line, is that Steve doesn't believe the iphone should be wrapped in condoms, duct tape, electrical tape, or plastic screen things.  The iPhone probably does look cool without all those things... but good luck finding one.

Everytime I see people holding an iPhone wrapped in some awful wrapping, I imagine that if I walked into their livingroom, I'd probably find that their furniture draped in large plastic coverings....

My App Store is Bigger Than Yours...

Really people, is this what it's come down to.  It seems that every few days I see a blog posting that heralds Apple because they have 140K+ apps, followed by, "oh and Android has a pitiful 20K+ apps".

What's the obsession with this comparison.  Let's face it, once your get past the first 1000 apps, you really don't have much left for comparisons.  How many calculators, twitter clients, flashlights, farts, etc, do we need?   I mean, using the # of apps as a success metric, would indicate that the Apple Mac OSX is basically a failure.  I mean windows has far more apps for the desktop than Apple, so, we must conclude that Apple has failed on the desktop, and should just fold up shop now.  The reality, is the Apple's desktop is probably just a strong as Windows, since again, after we get past the first several hundred apps... the rest really don't do much to attract a person to one OS vs the other.

It seems that this obsession with App numbers goes even deeper making intelligent people making statements like... "Apple can't help but to succeed with the ipad... when it releases, it will have 140K+ apps at its disposal".  I had someone say those exact words to me.  My comment was, "Oh, so OSX doesn't have 140K apps".  Let's face it, OSX has more than 140K apps, so it would make more sense for Apple to install OSX on a tablet to gain access to the millions of applications available on OSX.  But wait, that would mean that Apple couldn't control what you do with the device, and they could install applications from other sources, other than Apple.  That's not good for Apple.

I don't think that anyone is going to disagree that the iphone has more apps.  I have an ipod touch and an android phone.  I've installed about 20 apps on each, and beyond that, I can't say there's much more that really interests me.  Everyone is different, so chances are you are going to have a different set of 20 apps, but I'm willing to bet that even in those 20, we are going to have some overlap.

The number of apps in the store is a good marketing metric, but it doesn't indicate a useful measure of applications.  I've had people say that "free apps" are useless because they are free.  You do realize that the difference in 95% of the cases between a free app and a paid one... is the price.  I mean, in most cases, it's still some poor smuck writing the application in his/her spare time after work.  One person decides to give it away (like doing charity) and the other person decides to charge 99 cents.

I think a better metric is to look at metrics like month over month growth, and return rates, etc, but you don't see a lot of that happening.

So, the next time you hear yourself croaking out the 140K stat about the Apple App Store, just ask yourself, is that a relevant statistic in your argument.

Setting up Linux Software RAID in Ubuntu 9.04

I decided that I needed some data redundancy for my media collection and personal documents.   I was running zfs for awhile, with 2, 1 gig drives, but then I decided to switch to Linux Software Raid.

I found 2 pretty articles on how to setup and configure a Linux Software RAID.

• RAID - Ubuntu Wiki
• Software Bytes - Software Raid in Ubuntu

In my particular setup, I had 2, 1 gig disks, but I wanted to re-use those while switching to the software raid setup.  So, do that, I basically, stole a disk from the zfs raid setup, partitioned it, created the linux raid, formatted it, and then copied the zfs drive to the newly created linux raid device.  Pretty easy right?  Well, it was, but i'll into some extra details about the complete process.

I had 2 sata devices, /dev/sda, and /dev/sdb

First, install mdadm

# sudo apt-get install mdadm

When you install mdadm, it will want to install postfix.  I don't know why, but it does.  I just answered the basic install questions and carried on.

Next, prepare 1 of your 2 disks for a linux raid.

# sudo fdisk /dev/sda

If it doesn't have a partition, then create one (n), and then change the partition type to Raid Auto Detect (t then fd)

You should now have a /dev/sda1 device.  You can verify this using the print command (p) and then write (w) your changes.

Next, we create the raid array.  In my case, I will eventually have 2 disks, but I wanted to create the array with just a single disk (/dev/sda1) for now, and then add in the other disk (/dev/sdb1) later.

Creating the array was pretty simple.
# sudo mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda1 missing
Notice that for the second device, I used the word, "missing".  This is special reserved word for mdadm and it is used to acknowledge that you are creating an array, but you do not yet have all the devices.  You need at least 1 device, which I did have.

Now that you've created the array, we need to format it.

# sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/md0

That should take a few minutes, and we are now ready to mount the device.

# sudo mkdir /media/Transfer

# sudo mount /dev/md0 /media/Transfer

We now have a mounted device under /media/Tranfer.  We'll use that to transfer all the files from our old device onto the new device.  In my case, my zfs drive was mounted under /home, so I used rsync to sync the zfs mounted drive with my newly mounted linux raid device

# sudo rsync -av /home /media/Transfer

This will take a long time, depending on your disk size.  In my case, it took a couple of hours.

Once the transfer is complete, I then added in my other zfs drive to my linux raid.  This required that I partition the drive in the same way that I partitioned my other drive.  Basically, using fdisk, I created a new partition, and then set the partition type to fd (Linux Raid)

Once that was done, all I needed to do was add the new drive to my existing linux raid array.

# sudo mdadm --manage /dev/md0 -a /dev/sdb1

Once you do this, you'll notice your hard drive light will remain on or flash very quickly.  Basically the Raid Array is now copying all data from the source disk to the newly added disk.  This will take a couple of hours as well, but the system is fully usable during that time.

You can check the status of the Raid at any time by issuing the command

# cat /proc/mdstat

The output will be something like,

Personalities : [raid1]
md0 : active raid1 sda1[2] sdb1[0]
      976759936 blocks [2/1] [U_]
      [========>............]  recovery = 44.4% (434131840/976759936) finish=135.6min speed=66645K/sec


Finally, don't forget to update your /etc/fstab to reflect that your new mount device is /dev/md0 and not whatever it used to be.  In my case, it was a matter of changing the device to that /home was mounted as device /dev/md0

Tip: How to find to which jar a class file belongs

It's a common problem in larger projects, where you are using a Class reference, but you don't know which of the 20 jars in your project is actually providing the implementation.

In my case, I needed to know which jar file was providing the Hex class.

System.out.println(Hex.class.getProtectionDomain().
getCodeSource().getLocation().toString());

It turns out that it's in axis2.jar :)

Using Bookmarks in Your Development Projects

I've recently began helping with large project at work.  The project contains a very large codebase, and in working through all the pieces, I thought, "I wish I could just bookmark some of these locations, so that I could return to particular areas later on".   This thought hit me after I spent about 10 minutes trying to find a piece of code that I knew I visited earlier in the week.

It appears that I didn't have to look far for a bookmarking feature.  I use Eclipse, and the great folks on that project have already thought about this.  To bookmark a section of code, simply right click in the left hand margin of the code editor, and you'll see an "Add Bookmark..." link.  Click it, and you will create a bookmark in the code that you can then use to quickly jump back to that location.

You'll also want to add the "Bookmarks" view to your perspective as well.  Simply click Window -> Show View and enter Bookmark.  Then add that view.

Bookmarks isn't something that you'll need/want when you are browsing your own projects, but it can certainly save time when you are browsing code in a larger project that you are not yet familiar with.

Bookmarking... It's a good thing. (Sometimes)

Apple Store: Music to be DRM Free this year

Well it appears that Apple music will finally become totally DRM free by the end of the first quarter of this year.

The Apple Keynote for this year was quite dull, but that was one small piece of good news to come out of it.

How long before TV and Video execs realize that DRM is bad for their content as well?

XBMC on AppleTV - Is is worth it?

I Recently ordered an AppleTV for a friend. Our intentions were to use the AppleTV unit with XMBC. He currently has XMBC running the Xbox and we are both huge fans of the XMBC interface.

After unboxing the AppleTV, I immediately used atbusb-creator to create the boot loader that could install XMBC. There is a Windows version, but I could not get it to actually write the image to a USB drive on my Windows machine. Fortunately, I also have Leopard installed, so I was able to boot into OSX and run the Mac version, which ran fine. I also ended up using 2 different usb drives because during my first attempt the AppleTV unit did not recognize my usb drive. On my second attempt, using my Kingston Data Traveller, it worked fine. My first usb drive was just a cheap, unbranded, 1gig drive that bought a few years back.

Patching the AppleTV was a snap. I just followed the documentation. Once I rebooted the AppleTV I had an XBMC menu, which then allowed me to download and install the latest version quite easily.

This is where the fun stopped. First, the AppleTV unit does not have a power off (at least nothing that was obvious), so, for every reboot, I had to unplug the unit. While this wasn't a huge deal in my test environment, it's going to be annoying to anyone that has a unit in their home entertainment cabinet.

The AppleTV unit takes about 1 - 2 minutes to fully boot, and put you at the main menu. I was pleased, and yet surprised, but the simplicity and plainness of the AppleTV main menu. It's just a simple rectangular menu without a background image. For Apple, I was surprised that there wasn't more, but at the same time, I was happy that Apple decided to forgo gimicky, and stick with functional.

I didn't spend too much time in the AppleTV UI, since it's not really a useful piece of software, unless you have iTunes installed, or you are willing to buy or rent DRM movies. I did try out the YouTube videos. It worked. I went into the Movies section as well, and played a trailer. It worked. Since the AppleTV unit can't actually play anything over the network, without iTunes, I wasn't able to try out any streaming videos.

So, after a few minutes, I decided to launch XBMC. Having used XBMC on the XBOX for a couple of years, this was the real prize for me. After XBMC launched, I was actually stuck in a window (not fullscreen). I then used the Settings menu to make the application fullscreen. I Also calibrated the screen, so that the UI could fill the entire area. I wasn't disappointed with the UI. It was responsive and worked pretty much like the XBOX version.

I immediately configured XBMC to connect back to my media share. In a few minutes, I had complete access to all my movies and recorded shows. Playing an SD avi file played fine. Only having a 6 button remote proved to be challenging. You don't realize the extent to which you use other remote buttons, until you only have 6 to choose from. Let's just say, that in XMBC on the Xbox, having the extra buttons is really useful, and I'm sure they'd be useful on the AppleTV as well.

To my disappointment, the XBMC on the AppleTV could not play any 720p x264 content in a mkv container. I tried about 10 files, and all files were un watchable. Audio was fine, but the video was completely jittery. This was a huge disappointment for me. The core reason my friend had purchased this unit was because he wanted to watch 720p content in XBMC. That's not going to happen with this release. It's not the fault of XMBC, it's a great product, but there's only so much you can do when you have decode and render in software on such a limited device. Apparently the device will play 720p content if you convert it to mp4, but who wants to convert video?

We both should have done more research into XBMC on the AppleTV before buying the unit. But, we were such fans, we rushed in. Given that XBMC can't play 720p x64 content (without re-encoding it), then he could have purchased and Xbox and put XBMC on that for only $50. You can already play 720p content on an Xbox, if you are willing to convert it to mpeg2. So, right now, we have 1 brand new AppleTV unit for sale.

Is XBMC on the AppleTV worth it? Well, if you're an AppleTV fan, and you have already purchased an AppleTV for the purposes of renting and downloading movies, then I'd say that Yes, putting on XBMC is well worth it. XMBC will add functionality to the AppleTV unit, and you won't be disappointed, until you try to play your 720p content. But, if you are looking at buying an AppleTV just to run XBMC, then buy a Xbox. For much less, you will get the same features.

A couple of weeks ago, I test drove a Popcorn Hour unit. Even though I was unimpressed with the performance of the UI, I would certainly choose that unit over the AppleTV, solely based on the fact that it played my 720p mkv files without an issue.

Recently, SageTV released a stand alone HD Player, which I suspect would be the better than both the AppleTV or the Popcorn Hour. I haven't tried it myself, but you can check out more on the SageTV HD Theatre (HD200) on GeekTonic. I currently own the HD100 that SageTV released previous to the HD200, and it plays all my current media without issue.

The Bad

• Slow boot time
  
• No cables (except for power)
  
• Only 6 buttons on the remote
• XBMC can't play HD files
  
• No power off button
  
• The unit runs very hot
  

The Good

• Simple AppleTV interface
• XBMC was easy to install
• XBMC worked well (as long you don't need to play HD)
• Slim and Sleek unit
  

More AppleTV Images

Movie Listings

The Mummy Movie Details