Tag: Tech

So this is @irene. The real Irene.

At the beginning of last week, people began tweeting messages to me to, somehow, communicate with Hurricane Irene. In response, on Thursday, I posted "Btw, tweeting messages to @irene doesn’t deliver any messages to the hurricane. Sorry.“

Friends started retweeting the post, and more and more people started seeing it and following my account. By Friday morning, that tweet was reshared more than 100 times. I didn’t think much of it.

In case you missed it, here’s a collection of @irene’s entertaining tweets during the hurricane that said hi to the eastern seaboard of the United States.

So this is @irene. The real Irene.

Google shuts down Slide, cuts off Photovine & Disco

Despite having been launched to positive reviews, Photovine is among Slide’s products to be shut down as the independently operated division will be dissolved. Google purchased Slide last year for $200m but never fully integrated the company into itself. The unit allowed to operate on its own accord, sometimes releasing products that are competing with Google’s own internal products.

Slide is also known to favor iOS over Android with Disco and Photovine being two of its most well known apps making appearance on iPhone first. Since Larry Page replaced Eric Schmidt as CEO, he’s been consolidating and restructuring the company. It looks like Slide does not fit within his vision.

Slide founder Max Levchin will leave Google, as will Slide’s head of product, Jared Fliesler, who will join Square.

Photovine is a beautifully designed, very well done app, something that could have come out of Flickr had the Yahoo! people realized what opportunities it has with the photo sharing site. Photovine lets you post photos according to themes and discover other people’s photos who happen to share the same theme. 

Google shuts down Slide, cuts off Photovine & Disco

In the public’s eye, Cook has become the Riker to Jobs’ Picard—and people generally like Riker.

Jacqui Cheng writing about Tim Cook’s first company letter as CEO of Apple.

Waitaminute… Captain Cook?

Zombie iCal Calendars

Ever since Apple opened the beta version of Mail and iCal on MobileMe last year, my list of calendars in iCal (Calendars, not calendar entries) has been piling up. 

I’ve got to the point of having more than 2000 calendars in iCal and that was causing the app on the Mac as well as on MobileMe to take such a long time in opening. 

The MobileMe calendar actually would give up after several minutes and I haven’t even bothered to open iCal ever since. If I need to input anything into the calendar I would use the one on my iPhone instead and made sure it doesn’t sync with iTunes whenever I sync the iPhone.

I let my MobileMe account lapse last March and figured that would be the end of it. Having ignored iCal for months, I thought I might try Lion’s calendar for a change, completely forgetting that I have more than 2000 calendars, so it took a while to open and left me wondering until it finally opened and showed me my monster list.

I figured, okay, let’s find the proper calendars, export them to import back later and nuke the bastards so I can start iCal from fresh. Having gone through that, I opened iCal and found myself looking at a calendar app with no entries. Oh joy!. 

A few minutes later, I saw that the proper calendars were already loading. Hmm, that was strange but okay, saves me from having to import them. Note that my Mac was online during all this.

After having added one new calendar and a handful of entries, the app began to slow down and wouldn’t quit unless I force quit it. And then I decided to head down to home/Library/Calendars/ where I found 2004 folders of calendars appearing out of nowhere. ZOMG ZOMBIE CALENDARS!! THEY’RE BACK FROM THE DEAD!

I realized I had lost three subscribed calendars in the process but there I was looking at 2004 calendars. Where had they come from? Can’t be MobileMe, my account is gone. So then I proceed to remove all the calendars directly from the Finder for the second time. It’s been about 30 minutes and the zombie calendars haven’t made their way back yet. We’ll see later on.

Since I no longer have access to MobileMe, I can’t see whether I can do anything on the server side from MobileMe to stop this form happening again.

It also seems that old appointments and invitations from the calendars were being resent. All the way back from 2006. How do I know this? I’ve been getting failed delivery messages of those invitations in my Gmail inbox. Why Gmail? Not sure. I thought it should have been on my mac.com address, which would have bounced.

So far I haven’t seen the zombies returning again yet but if they do, I’ll make sure to grab a screenshot and post it here.

Letter from Steve Jobs

August 24, 2011

To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community:

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.

As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.

I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role. 

I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.

Steve 

Shortly after this letter was published, Apple announced that the board has elected Steve Jobs as Chairman and Tim Cook is now CEO and board member.

End of an era.

Letter from Steve Jobs

MP3tunes ruling opens the door for online music lockers

Google and Amazon could well be allowed to run their music locker cloud service without having to seek permission from record labels as the judge in the mp3tunes case puts the responsibility in users’ hands instead of the site’s operators’.

mp3tunes was found to infringe only on songs that it new were pirated but did not remove following a notice.

the DMCA imposes no obligation to investigate potentially infringing activity absent a specific complaint from copyright holders. The only exception is links to sites with URLs containing “red flag” words like “pirate” or “bootleg.

The quoted paragraph above means that without a specific notice from copyright holders, a site’s operator has no obligation to voluntarily check whether files stored in its servers are infringing on copyrights.

MP3tunes ruling opens the door for online music lockers

In the future, I think the thin line between smartphones and feature phones will slowly disappear. There will be no such thing as a smartphone. There will be just .. phones.

And Blackberries.

Hmm, someone seems to have some faith in RIM.

What the $99 TouchPad firesale tells us about the tablet market

Harry McCracken on Technologizer:

the TouchPad fire sale–which probably appealed more to bargain-hunting gadget nerds than the masses–is such a bizarre event that it just doesn’t tell us that much about the potential market for very low-cost tablets.

Ian Betteridge puts it even more succinctly:

Nothing.

Twitter landscape in Indonesia 2011

Saling silang published a report on the state of “social media” in Indonesia for the first half of 2011 which you can see on Slideshare. Some of the highlights with regards to Twitter:

  • There are nearly 85 million internet users in Indonesia according to Business Measurement Intelligence report
  • Third most active country on Twitter with 13% of tweets, nearly doubles the UK at 4th place with 7%. The US tops the list with 28% of tweets, followed by Brazil with 24%.
  • Nearly 1.3 million tweets per day collectively
  • No day is significantly more chatty than the other. 
  • The busiest times during the day are between 5 pm and 10 pm (33% of tweets) but mornings make up 30% of tweets.
  • Jakarta is the most tweeting city with 13% of tweets, followed by Yogyakarta with 11.7% and Surabaya with 11.3%.
  • Nearly 87% of tweets are from mobile devices.

Twitter landscape in Indonesia 2011

Google Shows How Not to Complain About the Patent Mess

parislemon:

Great breakdown of Google’s patent post by Harry McCracken. 

It is fairly amazing that one poorly constructed post has managed to turn Google from a sympathetic figure in all of this into a jackass/crybaby hybrid. 

I think the idea behind the post was right, it’s just that Google tried to be specific without being specific enough (and without vetting at least one crucial thing). Perhaps they should have taken the most general, common-sense approach and simply taken a stand against bullshit patents.

Of course, they can’t really do that with a straight face while they’re trying to buy 8,800 new ones at the same time.

Google Shows How Not to Complain About the Patent Mess