Month: December 2003

sub $200 iPods possible?

Macrumors points out that a company called Cornice “has been producing 1inch 1.5GB Hard Drives since mid year that go for $65/each in lots of 10,000. Cornice was reportedly trying to get these prices down to $50.”
[ . . . ]
This is truly getting interesting. As readers have pointed out, 2 GB in flash cards would make the new iPods cost prohibitive as they would be even more expensive than the current ones. Using this technology though, Apple could pull it off and still reap in quite a substantial profit per unit while creating a new form factor and price that would make the iPod even more attractive to potential buyers.

from iPodHead.com

What struck me about this was how this might work with pre-loaded iPods. After all, part of Eric’s idea was to tie some skinning or physical component of the iPod with the music: a Black Sabbath/Ozzy one would be black, while a Deadful one might have some of their iconography on it. Since these rumored gadgets are supposed to have theming as part of their value proposition, it’ll be interesting to see if someone (perhaps some bright spark in the RIAA cartel?) picks up this ball and runs with it . . .

Posted with ecto

initial backup solution

Nothing like the site of someone else’s mishap to focus attention on a problem.

The objectives of this are simple: back up the www directory on this machine in some easily usable form. I have a tape drive in this box, but tapes are not the easiest things to work with. So I elected to make a disk image that I can either burn to a CD or mount and inspect, as needed. The EXAMPLES section in the mkisofs man page gave me all the information I needed.

But I don’t necessarily want to burn a CD every time I back these files. So what I’ll do is create the image every night, copy to another system, thereby having two copies, the same as I could get if I burned to a CD but without the media cost.

#!/bin/sh
DATE=`date +%m-%d-%y`
cd /usr/local
/usr/local/bin/mkisofs -o /opt/backup/www-$DATE.iso -V backup-$DATE -R -J -hfs www
/sbin/mount_smbfs //me@backuphost/me /mnt/backuphost
cp /opt/backup/www-$DATE.iso /mnt/backuphost
cd /mnt/backuphost
cp www-$DATE.iso latest.iso
cd /opt/backup
/sbin/umount /mnt/backuphost
find /opt/backup -name "www*iso" -mtime +7 -print

Not too elegant, but I have tested it to make sure it creates mountable disk images and that’s what I’m after.

I’m going to take a leap of faith that I don’t lose a disk or the whole system on both systems I’m using for this. A logical extension of this would be to test that the mount operation (and the resulting copy) worked and substitute another place for the file to be stored.

Posted with ecto

ecto: Kung Log’s big brother

Well, I have been beta-testing this for a couple of days now, and I like it a lot. I like not having to use the browser for everything. It’s faster than using a browser, for one thing.

I like using custom tags (you can assign a custom tag to a keystroke combination and quickly format some part of your entry: some variables can be interpolated). File uploads are nice and fast, just as in Kung Log and better than using Movable Type’s browser interface (more the browser than MT, I realize).

I suspect this will be even more popular/successful than Kung Log . . . .

Posted with ecto

a friend writes . . .

Great news!!! I recently received news that I passed the October 2003
Patent Bar exam and now have my provisional registration number for the
USPTO. I have been working at the University of Washington Law School for
over a year now and am interested in a new challenge. Please let me know
if you hear of any opportunities which may suit my background, preferrably
in the Seattle metro area. My technical experience is in biotechnology (BS
degree and four years industry experience) and computer science. I am
interested in either litigation or patent prosecution, and mostly just want
to start practicing IP law.

This is definitely a happy new year for me. Best to you in 2004.

Fourth departure I’ve learned of this week . . . .

If you know of anything, I’ll pass it along (I don’t want to open anyone up for spam).

Posted with ecto

do you feel secure?

The agents were huddled together, and recognized us. “What did you do with the fish?” they asked, “What did you do with the fish!?”

Sensing a chance for comeuppance, Trey put on his “stone-cold-supportive-protector” face and said with great dramatics, “You know what … we flushed him. We flushed him because you made us [pause for effect]. You killed my girlfriend’s fish. No, you made her kill her fish … Happy holidays.”

I just read a section of Beyond Fear with some both chilling and amusing insights into how “secure” we are in the post-9/11 world when I read this article about how some TSA minion insisted a college student’s pet fish had to be X-rayed or disposed of.

I dunno: a Betta fish doesn’t scare me all that much but stupid minions of a misguided bureaucracy do.

apologies to MSIE users

At some time in the distant past, I made some changes to my stylesheet here to the sidebar stuff on the right.

margin-left: 66%;
width: 33%;

It looked OK to me (note the “Works for me” button at the bottom of that column). But it had the unfortunate effect, for IE users, of pushing everything in that column to the bottom of the page. That sidebar only had a calendar in it, as far as any if you could tell. IE apparently suffers from some standards compliance issues. I’ll take the blame for not testing it, but this was hardly an esoteric thing I was doing.

Now, I did check it in a couple of browsers (Mozilla and it’s robust progeny — Camino, FireBird) and in KHTML-based browsers (Konqueror and Safari). But even when I was using Windows, I never used IE, so I never noticed this.

mea culpa
Continue reading “apologies to MSIE users”

FUD removal, iPod section

iPod Battery FAQ

  • Is the iPod’s battery replaceable?
  • Is the iPod’s battery user-replaceable?
  • What is the iPod’s warranty? Does it cover the battery? Is there any way to extend it?
  • Does Apple think the iPod is disposable?
  • I heard that the iPod’s battery only lasts 18 months, and then you have to buy a new iPod! Is that true?
  • Will the iPod’s battery degrade over time?
  • What kind of battery does the iPod use?
  • Why didn’t Apple use better batteries?
  • How can I get the most out of the iPod’s battery?
  • If my battery dies, will I lose all of my music?
  • Is it okay to leave the iPod in the dock, or otherwise attached to external power, for extended periods of time?
  • Why doesn’t Apple make the battery easily replaceable? Or use different batteries, like AA?
  • Is there any way to use an external battery pack, or standard AA batteries?
  • No one else uses an integrated battery!
  • Apple only released their battery replacement service because of all the bad publicity from iPod’s Dirty Secret.
  • Is there something wrong with the iPod? It shouldn’t have these problems!

    • That pretty much covers it. Thanks to Frank for the tip.