Archive for July, 2007

iTunes rantings…

Sunday, July 22nd, 2007

What makes Apple computers so popular is their supposedly intuitively-to-use software. I have to admit that I can’t comment on “native” (read: MacOS) Apple software, but I can comment on Apple’s Windows software and my comments aren’t exactly favorable…

A few days ago, I installed Apple’s latest iTunes software for Windows. I had already played around with a previous version of iTunes (4.x I think) which I didn’t like very much then, because it was “sluggish” even on fast computers (because it obviously didn’t make use of multithreading so it blocked every now and then,) not very well integrated into the Windows desktop, etc.

Unfortunately Apple didn’t make their homework. iTunes still is very sluggish to use (at least on my 1.2 GHz, 1 GB RAM machine,) and it’s also not very intuitive to use. Let me give you an example: I configured iTunes not to use the “1-click buy” feature, but to use a shopping cart. I bought a song and wanted to download it. I searched around, but couldn’t find the shopping cart, no matter where I looked. I finally found it in a different iTunes window, that was laying around under the current window. Hey, is this intuitive???

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Look, Ma, I’ve got an iPhone… ;-)

Tuesday, July 17th, 2007

Not! :-)

Seriously, now. A colleague today brought his iPhone with him, and I had the chance to briefly (read “one minute”) play with it. Here’s me holding it in my hand:

I was astonished how large and heavy it is, compared to my SonyEricsson W880i. It felt very “solid,” tho (or probably just because of this ;-) ). My colleague usually wears it in his trouser’s back pocket. The display was excellent — very brilliant and “crispy.”

We had a presentation about the Greenphone some colleagues are developing software for, and in a short break I had a minute to look at the iPhone. No more, or else I would be able to write more about it.

Preventing flooding in Perl

Wednesday, July 4th, 2007

I’m using a small Perl script to send SMS for Nagios notifications. Up to now I didn’t have any flood control (i. e. logic that limits the rate of messages to be sent) built into the script, which made me feel bad (especially since I had already been SMS-bombed a while ago when the link to the servers to be monitored broke down).

My search for some Perl sample code that implements flood control led me to an article on Perl.com and the CPAN Perl package Algorithm::FloodControl, which does exactly what I need and which is easy to use at the same time. I very much recommend this package.

Meeting M. le Président…

Sunday, July 1st, 2007

We were in Paris last Saturday (June, 23rd) to visit the Le Bourget Aérosalon, the Paris Air Show. Suddenly, there was a large crowd of photographers, and a lot of confusion. By chance I noticed the photographers were wearing badges that said “Visit of the President” (in French, of course.)

We escaped the confusion and went to Dassault’s exhibition stand, which was in immediate neighborhood of the hall we met the crowd. Suddenly we noticed that Dassault’s employees gathered, obviously in order to welcome someone. Guess who it was?

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