Category: books

Economist.com | Apple Computer:

Even though the iPod now outsells Apple’s computers by volume, most of the firm’s revenues still come from the computers—the iMac desktop, the iBook laptop and the high-end Power Mac and PowerBook. So Mr Jobs still needs to fix Apple’s longstanding problem in its core business, which is that its global market share in computers seems stuck at about 3%.

Well, lookee there: Porsche, never considered a doomed company, barely uses any ink on this chart, while BMW seems right around 3-4%. Know anyone who frets about BMW going away?

The idea that Apple is a a failure unless it dethrones MSFT says more about reporters’ feelings about the companies — and their founders — than about the market in which they operate.

The article goes on to accurately assess the niche Apple’s mini was designed to fill:

Cutting the price tag of the new box by leaving out the peripherals rather than by stripping down its functionality is a shrewd way of minimising two risks. It is unlikely to cannibalise sales and profit margins of Apple’s more expensive models; and it is likely to snap many Windows users out of their inertia and into making the switch. As more of them do, Mr Jobs reckons, the converts will tell other Windows users how safe Macs are (compared to Microsoft’s buggy, virus-prone software) and how user-friendly (just try networking several Macs together, compared to several Windows machines).

So on balance, they got more right than wrong, but it would be nice to read an article that didn’t expose the reporter’s frustrations, but laid out the facts.

They dropped my service twice yesterday and so far once today.

For some reason, traffic just stops flowing and nothing short of rebooting both the cable modem and the server will resolve it. The cable modem seems unable to re-establish the flow of bits to the external interface and using dhclient(8) to try dropping and requesting networking configuration information seems to fail.

Time to look into DSL, perhaps.

<update @ 2240> I hate Comcast even more. Service just went out again.

Customer Care sez they’ll swap me a new modem if I bring this one in. After four years, I suppose it’s likely to be past it’s sell-by date. DSL is still a possibility, if I can get a good deal. Speakeasy, beloved as they are, cost even more than Comcast and I’ll never be able to sell a more expensive service to the Powers That Be.

Minty MP3:

Minty Music!

Tired of not being able to find cases for your projects? Stuck with those hideous ABS plastic RadioShack boxes? Try those ubiquitous tin boxes, not only do they block EMI, they come with free mints! Fresh breath and fresh design in one.

Now playing: The Icicle Melts by The Cranberries from the album “No Need To Argue”

According to DINNM, I could use some. Makes me wish I had swung for a PowerBook . . . maxed out at 640 Mb as I am, I’ll just have to deal with it.

Interesting little app, though: it can be set to beep at you when your system swaps. It didn’t take long to get it beeping.

Now playing: Life In Prison by The Byrds from the album “Sweetheart Of The Rodeo” | Get it

Your 17 shares in rebecca’s pocket <http://www.rebeccablood.net/> were sold at B$11,068.62 ea. (3 x B$3,689.54 – the current price) because xxxxxxx performed a hostile takeover using a Blustocking (artefact).

Your account has been credited a total of B$188,166.53 for this transaction which brings it to B$741,469.34.

Anyone need some BlogShares $$?
Now playing: Where I End And You Begin (The Sky Is Falling In) by Radiohead from the album “Hail To The Thief” | Get it

eBay item 3866072905 (Ends Jan-15-05 14:24:52 PST) – Nikon Super Coolscan LS-2000

It’s not the right one for me, so I’ll re-sell it and keep looking.

Now playing: III. Volcano (Adagio-Allegro) Sym No.50 ‘Mount St. Helens’ Op.360 by Seattle Symphony from the album “Sym 50 ‘Mount St. Helens’/Symphony 22 ‘City Of Light'” | Get it

It’s been an exciting couple of days. When I passed along the news about CNN’s RSS feeds, I figured I might see an uptick in traffic, but it came in pretty hard. Turned out to be a good opportunity for tuning the server and kernel, but the addition of the santy worm didn’t help.

What seemed to happening was the webserver processes (Apache 1.3.33) were getting bound up: the mysql backend didn’t seem to be breathing all that hard. So after some Googling, I decided to tinker with some sysctl variables:

sysctl net.inet.tcp.always_keepalive=0
sysctl net.inet.tcp.sendspace=65535
sysctl net.inet.tcp.recvspace=65535

I turned off keepalives for connection unless they specifically request it. I also opened up the transfer buffers a bit and that seemed to help quite a bit. Load seemed to dissipate quite quickly, even though traffic was still coming in. It should be possible to have the send and recv buffers assymettrical: requests are smaller, much smaller, than replies (the graphic doesn’t make it so clear: the green is inbound requests, the blue replies), but I’ll leave it as it is for now. The max in was 267kBits, out was 213 kBits: pesky santy floods are those spikes you see. The peak hit rate was 17 hits/minute: errors peaked at 1,950, but are almost nonexistent when we’re not logging bogus requests.

I seem to remember going through this in Solaris 2.5 in 1996 or so, trying to cope with everyone surfing at work. Ah, yes, Netscape server 2.0 and Solaris 2.5/2.6 on 170MHz single CPU Sparcs, clients like Navigator 2 and 3 . . . not quite stone knives and bear skins, but light years behind today.

Now playing: Locked Out by Crowded House from the album “Recurring Dream” | Get it

Will Eisner, 1917-2005:

I was woken up this morning, with the news that Will had died last night, aged 87, and I’ve let a few friends know, and already had to speak to one journalist about who Will was and what he did (“It’s as if Orson Welles had made Citizen Kane and redefined what you could do in film, and then carried on making movies until now,” I said, wishing I could come up with a better analogy, and knowing that that didn’t explain it. And I didn’t mention how proud he was of any of us who did good comics — how much he cared about the medium — or how glad I am that I got to tell him that I wouldn’t have written comics if it wasn’t for him. There’s a reason that the Oscars of comics are the Eisner Awards.)

I have been reading more and more comics and books about comics (Scott McCloud’s two books are great resources[“Understanding Comics”, “Reinventing Comics : How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form”]), and I was just notified this morning that Eisner’s Comics & Sequential Art was waiting for me at my local library branch. I also just learned — from Neil Gaiman’s postings — that Eisner’s studio was just a few miles from where I spent my formative years: I’m sure he wasn’t working there when I grew up, but I recognized the address as one I must have passed hundreds of times.

If I were the type of person who makes public resolutions, I could say safely say that this year I hope to create more, be it in writing, pictures, whatever — even crummy programming code.

Now playing: Overture to La Forza del Destino by Giuseppe Verdi from the album “Verdi: Overtures and Preludes”

You are our soldiers in Iraq who a few months ago were just Boys! Boys workin the hype for Friday night’s football game. Or out cruisin on a Saturday night hoping to “get lucky”.

You are the boys we have asked to be men
in a real big hurry!

Take a look at this photo-collage tribute to “the army we have.” They’re as good as it gets and more than we deserve.

I look at a kid of 22/24 learning how to use prosthetic legs or to get through the day without his arm and think of the armchair generals who thought this was going to be easy, that the people would strew the streets with rose petals, who blame the soldiers for their lack of planning and reluctance to see that they were wrong.

I’m guessing we won’t see the 101st Fighting Keyboarders talking about these images and the sacrifice they represent.