Archive for the ‘apple’ Category

pre iOS 4 ipad change

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010

Somewhen since I last paid attention to it, they made a change to the iPad OS, so that I can have more apps installed than are visible on the ~9 pages they give you.  It is a little disconcerting during downloads/updates, since you can’t see any indication of progress, only the spinning network activity indicator lets you know things are happening, somewhere, deep where you can’t see.  But once the spinner stops, assuming you remember the name of the app, you can search your iPad for it, and launch it from the search results page.

Now I just need an app to remind me what the name of that app I just downloaded is.  I think I’ll call it “Dave’s not here, man!” =p

Steve Jobs hates you

Monday, October 25th, 2010

Doesn’t seem to be much other reason for him to deliberately remove the screen-orientation lock button’s functionality.      There’d better be a way to lock the screen orientation in software still, or I won’t be upgrading.

Ping Off, Steve

Wednesday, October 6th, 2010

Dear Steve Jobs,

Ping sucks, big time.  If you are going to try and demand that we all let you be the gateway for deciding what kinds of music we are allowed to like and what bands we want to follow, you’re going to have to develop a decent taste for music.  You don’t even support 90% of the stuff that’s for sale in iTunes.  I gave it a shot, ’cause I like stats and tracking history and whatnot, but I turned it off today, and probably won’t ever try it again.    Now if only I could turn off the stupid ping button that shows up on every track.

iTunes store search broken on iPad/iPhone/iTouch

Tuesday, October 5th, 2010

There’s something seriously messed up with searching the iTunes app store from an iDevice.  I’ve found at least two consistent examples of applications that are searchable and downloadable via iTunes-on-a-desktop, but are not even visible in search results from an iDevice like the pad, touch, or phone.

Nike+ GPS

Brion Gysin: Dream Machine

It’s an odd error condition, my guess would be it’s caused by having a separate search index for the mobile devices.  What is particularly annoying about the error is that auto suggest will start to fill in the name of the apps correctly, but then gives you no results.  Following a direct link to the app from safari just gives you an error once the device switches from browser to store mode.    Another great job of QA there apple.

UPDATE:  Darshan the useless, why does Apple pay you?  Then again, at least you could get email, even if you couldn’t understand basic english enough to do your job (or maybe you understood just fine, and have taken an American attitude towards your job); nike’s app support page just sticks you in a never ending loop if you try to submit feedback to them.

UPDATE2:  If you want to send feedback to Nike, ignore the big orange button that says “feedback”.  Look for the smaller link that says “contact us”…that one isn’t broken.

UPDATE3:  “resolved”

It turns out the problem is the lack of synchronization on iOS 4.x availability.  In their infinite wisdom, apple decided to have search pretend an app doesn’t exist, if your device isn’t running the required OS version.  Seems like the smarter, more user friendly UI design would be to return the items marked unavailable with a reason why, but I guess someone wanted to make sure the call center in India had enough pointless work to do.

Rsync, Mac OS X, and external USB drives

Monday, October 4th, 2010

For the last year or so, I’ve had two 1tb external USB drives, one attached to a winPC at work, the other to a MacPC at home.  I kept them synchronized with rsync over ssh, and had silently been bemoaning the lack of consistent support for extended characters.  Lots of “file vanished” type errors.

Recently, the USB drive at home started ejecting itself; seemed like a sign of impending overall failure, so I went and bought a replacement drive, 2tb ’cause it was on sale.  When I got it home, I had to reformat it before the Mac could write to it (in fairness, the box did mention this, I just didn’t read the box), so I went with journaled MacFS.  Today’s sync is taking extra time because it’s finally started successfully transfering the files with embedded extended chars, ala “Bj\#224rk”.  All this time, I assumed the problem was poor character set support in the mac version of rsync, turns out it was more of a FAT filesystem problem.  Learn something every day.

Or maybe rsync just discovered a new way of duplicating files.  d’ohwell.

iTunes process xx exceeded 500 log message per second limit

Thursday, September 16th, 2010

Dealing with some driver errors on my iMac, I started looking at /var/log/system.log on my Snow Leopard machine, and noticed that when I start iTunes, it’s generating a boatload of log messages of questionable value.

It’s row after row of incrementing numbers

Sep 16 10:22:03 WideMac [0x0-0x1e01e].com.apple.iTunes[202]: 14212
Sep 16 10:22:03 WideMac [0x0-0x1e01e].com.apple.iTunes[202]: 1
Sep 16 10:22:03 WideMac [0x0-0x1e01e].com.apple.iTunes[202]: 2
Sep 16 10:22:03 WideMac [0x0-0x1e01e].com.apple.iTunes[202]: 3

Sep 16 10:22:03 WideMac [0x0-0x1e01e].com.apple.iTunes[202]: *** process 202 exceeded 500 log message per second limit  -  remaining messages this second discarded ***

Once the next second comes up, the messages start again.  It goes all the way up to about 10,000 before it hits another discard message and doesn’t start again when the next second comes up.  Odd.

LogMeInGuiAgent blocking Mac OS X login

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

Sep 15 07:30:47 WideMac LMIGUIAgent[111]: 3891612: (connectAndCheck) Untrusted apps are not allowed to connect to or launch Window Server before login.
Sep 15 07:30:47 WideMac LMIGUIAgent[111]: kCGErrorFailure: Set a breakpoint @ CGErrorBreakpoint() to catch errors as they are logged.
Sep 15 07:30:47 WideMac com.logmein.logmeinguiagent[111]: Wed Sep 15 07:30:47 WideMac.local LMIGUIAgent[111] <Warning>: 3891612: (connectAndCheck) Untrusted apps are not allowed to connect to or launch Window Server before login.
Sep 15 07:30:47 WideMac com.logmein.logmeinguiagent[111]: Wed Sep 15 07:30:47 WideMac.local LMIGUIAgent[111] <Error>: kCGErrorFailure: Set a breakpoint @ CGErrorBreakpoint() to catch errors as they are logged.
Sep 15 07:30:47 WideMac LMIGUIAgent[111]: HIToolbox: received notification of WindowServer event port death.
Sep 15 07:30:47 WideMac LMIGUIAgent[111]: port matched the WindowServer port created in BindCGSToRunLoop
Sep 15 07:30:47 WideMac com.logmein.logmeinguiagent[111]: Session – Error occured:read errno:Bad file descriptor
Sep 15 07:30:47 WideMac com.logmein.logmeinguiagent[111]: WINLOG – 7 SessionManager Connection closed
Sep 15 07:30:47 WideMac com.logmein.logmeinguiagent[111]: WINLOG – 7 SessionManager Closing DisplayServer
Sep 15 07:30:47 WideMac com.logmein.logmeinguiagent[111]: WINLOG – 7 SessionManager DisplayServer close
Sep 15 07:30:47 WideMac com.logmein.logmeinguiagent[111]: WINLOG – 7 SessionManager Exiting
Sep 15 07:30:49 WideMac com.apple.launchd[1] (com.logmein.logmeinguiagent[111]): Exited with exit code: 1

I was going to try and reboot in single-user mode to see what difference that might make, but because the bluetooth keyboard wasn’t recognized before the window for requesting single-user had passed, I ended up in a regular reboot, and the problem has disappeared.  Or at least I was able to login.

I’ve had a USB drive keep ejecting itself unsafely yesterday, we’ll see if the reboot fixed that too….

iTunes 10, worse than before

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

I could care less about the silly icon drama.  I’m more peeved with the way it just crashed after less than 3 hours of playing music.  Great job on the QA there Steve Jobs.  Seriously, did anyone at Apple bother trying this product out before release?

At least it saved whatever work it was doing the first time I started it up, with the “updating library” shtuff, and didn’t have to repeat that part.  Kind of surprising, considering how easy it is to lose information you’ve entered by hand to update your library.

UPDATE:  Ping seems to have gotten little QA time.  Basic things like searching for an artist doesn’t work.  Nor have the bothered to update any of their support webpages to include iTunes 10 as a version.  Heck, they haven’t even added the iPad to the list of supported devices for an iTunes store support request.  Talk about doing a terrible job.

UPDATE2:  Perhaps it’s not that search is ‘broken’, so much as it is being limited to ‘approved’ artists in a deceptive manner.  So broken philosophically, but probably working in so much as “being evil” is by design with Steve Jobs.

UPDATE3:  This version still has the horrible lack of responsiveness issues that every other version for the PC has shown.  I can double click on a track, and it will take 35-55 seconds for the current song to stop playing.

iPad 3G is dead =(

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

When I foursquared in this morning, it was all working fine, but by the time I got to Nickerson Street Saloon for lunch, it was dead of the worst sort.  PC doesn’t recognize any sort of device being plugged in.  sigh.

UPDATE:  I would swear I had done all the possible combinations of the two buttons available to me, for the standard 10 seconds.  Then again, he said it was 15 seconds of holding down both home and power.  So far, looks OK again.  All things crash.

open iPad, insert video

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

Someone came up with a decent xvid/divx player for the iPad, and it’s even free.  CineXPlayer seems to totally rock, in my limited testing so far.  It lets you load movies via the iTunes file sharing system, doesn’t require pre-conversion, supports seeking forward without losing audio sync, resumes from where you left off.  Once I get home, I’ll have to thrown some more unusual avi’s at it, see what it makes of them.