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Tag Archives: Tech News

5 Things You Won’t See At Apple’s September Announcement

So I’m lying here, unable to sleep, not because I’m dreaming up what Apple is going to announce tomorrow, but it has given me some time to think.

There’s been lots of ideas floated around, so I figured I should jump into the mix now before the news so I can call these predictions of things you definitely WON’T see

The iPod Touch with a built-in microphone and bluetooth — This would harshly cannibalize iPhone sales, particularly given the cost of iPhone data plans.

iTunes Music Subscriptions — People like to own their music. ’nuff said.

iPhone Revisions — Not a chance, with the 3G iPhone barely 3 months old, there’s no way that Apple can justify a revision already.  The backlash from iPhone early adopters last year will be a lesson.

The “MacBook Touch” — Even though a niche of Apple fans would love to see a Mac tablet to compete with all of the Windows based tablets out there, it just doesn’t make up a large enough piece of the overall computer market for Apple to try to carve out a piece.

Beatles Music in the iTunes Catalogue — Despite recent notions from some pundits that the Fab Four’s music will be part of the “Let’s Rock” announcement, there have been far too many false alarms for this to be the case.  Besides, the music is being remastered right now and will probably go through some kind of digital release next year once that’s done.

So there you have it, the five things you definitely won’t see at the Let’s Rock announcement.  Now we can sit back and see what the all things “i” maker will announce later today.

Waxing Poetic on the DNS Incident

For those of you who haven’t been following recent security news, there’s been a major defect found in the DNS protocol which has led to a series of patches for all forms of DNS servers.  Though the issue doesn’t affect most peoples’ home computers, it does affect pretty much every ISP on the planet as it makes older versions of DNS vulnerable to a DNS Cache Poisoning attack.

With a vulnerability so wide-reaching, security researchers decided it would be wise to keep the exact nature of the vulnerability something of a secret until the patches were ready.  They did however announce that a vulnerability had been found.

This announcement was all it took for security-savvy netizens (the ones who know just enough to be dangerous) to start speculating and researching the nature of the DNS defect.  The good thing?  They figured it out.  The bad thing?  They publicized it.

As a keen observer of the whole mess, security expert and blogger Chris Hoff decided to dedicate a poem to the DNS Debacle.  I’ve included a short excerpt:

A bunch of big egos
called Dan on a bluff
said his vuln was a copy
of 10 year old stuff

So Dan swore them on handshakes
and details were provided
and those same cocky claims
soon all but subsided

Go and check the poem out.  It’s extremely creative, and as far as I can tell factually accurate to the events that took place.  My hat’s off to Chris Hoff for providing the prose, now we’ll all cross our fingers and see how it goes…  ;)

Google Apologizes for Monday’s FUBAR

Gmail’s product manager pushed an article to the official Gmail blog late on Monday to acknowledge the problems that many GMail users faced trying to access their email on Monday afternoon (PT).

We’ve identified the source of this issue and fixed it. In addition, as with all issues that affect Gmail and our other services, we’re conducting a full review of what went wrong and moving quickly to update our internal systems and procedures accordingly.

The post does not provide any real detail as to the source of the problem, only an acknowledgment and an apology for the inconvenience.

The outage provided people with extra free time on their hands to try out their artistic abilities in describing the problem.  This was my favourite of the GMail Fail Whales:

Image Credit: Todd Garland of HubSpot, this copy from YoavShapira’s photostream.

So yea, apparently email is critical to most people’s regular day.  Whoda thunk it?

Mars Phoenix Confirms Water on Red Planet

Earlier this week the Mars Phoenix rover made an astounding discovery.  It was finally able to confirm the presence of water ice.  The find in and of itself marks the first time that water has been confirmed for certain on any heavenly body other than our own azure sphere.

The Phoenix rover uncovered ice crystals and after NASA officials discovered that the crystals had sublimated in a matter of a few days, they decided to run more detailed tests on them — mainly to try melting the ice.

The University of Arizona also put up a good piece on their involvement with the project.

This means that there could, potentially, be organisms in that water if it can stay in liquid form long enough… really that’s the biggest barrier to life on Mars, the water ice sublimates so quickly in the direct heat of Martian daylight that organisms don’t have much chance to develop.

NASA’s official Mars Phoenix mission website has even stated that the mission will be extended by about a month due to the discovery.  It’s now slated to complete at the end of September.

The news is indeed exciting.  It wasn’t a complete surprise to find the ice on Mars as there had been previous evidence from satellite flybys of the Martian arctic.  Space.com has a more complete article on this story including quotes from officials involved in the project.

iPhone 3G Jailbroken — Ha!

Well that didn’t take long.

In a short post titled “Thanks for waiting :) ” released yesterday, the iPhone Dev Team released Pwnage 2.0 for jailbreaking iPhones running the iPhone firmware version 2.0.

It should be noted that this doesn’t unlock your iPhone, it only opens up all the things that the old Jailbreak used to do.  With the advent of the app store, this is now more of a “hardcore” change than ever before… but nonetheless, Kudos to the iPhone Dev team!

Update #1: I also meant to note that un the first day since this was released, the blog entry received over 2800 comments.  Thats one way to get traffic.  :P

Firefox 3 Released

I realize that I’ve been rather delinquent in my blogging recently, and to be honest, that may continue in the coming weeks.  That said, I needed to get this out and spread the word, if a little late, that Firefox 3 has been released.

Go download it!  I’ll wait….

There now… doesn’t that feel better?

Many of the extensions have already been upgraded to work with the new version, and others are sure to follow soon.  I’ll keep an eye on things and try to let you know when PortableApps releases Firefox3.

Also, if you download today (or by 10:00am PT tomorrow), you can be among those participating in Mozilla’s Guinness World-Record attempt.

Vancouver Apple Store Opening May 24th – 10:00am

This Saturday marks a major milestone for the city of Vancouver.  Well, perhaps not for the city, but definitely for the mac-geeks in the region.  This Saturday is the long-awaited opening of an Apple store west of Toronto.


Photo Credit: xtianyves on Flickr

I’m not the only excited local blogger.  See some posts today from DuaneStory and Miss604 (via the twittersphere of course).

The Apple Store announcement on the Apple website provides all the necessary details for the grand opening and even provides links to start booking your “genius bar” appointments.  Time to get my MacBook case fixed again, the timing is wonderful.

WordPress 2.5: The rubber hits the road

WordPress LogoWordPress 2.5 is out, warts and all, for public consumption today.  Many users are opting to wait for a burn-in period to take place before taking the plunge.  Several major updates from WordPress have had a point-release take place within days, usually to fix a security flaw.

I have installed it on the sandbox where I’m playing around with the Options theme and won’t be applying the upgrade here until I’m ready to move everything over, including the theme.

The biggest complaint from most is the redesign of the admin pages.  People don’t like change.  There is added functionality and a brand new layout to the admin screens.  After having played with it for only a couple of days, I find myself fumbling around a bit still… but overall the new look isn’t too bad.

Many of the links I used most often are now displayed in the main admin toolbar (blue links) while the less often used links are in the grey bar at the top of the page.  These are the high-level nav buttons like the dashboard.  I think this design will indeed prove effective for people who spend quite a bit of time in the admin console, but will be more difficult for casual users to adopt.

I’ll be posting updates to both the Random Image Selector plugin and the Admin Links Widget in the near future to ensure compliance with the WP 2.5 code.

Apple Support Treats Us Like Babies… Sometimes

Please Apple, heed my call.  We’re not all n00bs.

I performed a series of software updates on my computer today.  Apple has learned that some of us would like to know what our update contains, beyond the simple “bug fixes” or “compatibility fixes” that it typically lists with each update.

My ask is simple, whenever there’s a software update, tell us what’s in it.  This way we can assess how important it is to us, and how soon we need to apply it.  If I find out that the Finder has a bug in it which will allow a malicious web-page to access my hard drive when I use Safari… I don’t care.  I don’t use Safari.  But if I did, I’d apply that a lot more quickly than I would an update to add the latest HP printer drivers.

Here are examples of two recent Apple updates.  One is done correctly.  The other is not.  See if you can spot the difference.


BAD!  Why? “Compatibility Improvements” isn’t very damned descriptive.


Good!  Link is provided to give those who actually want to know, the information they need.

Apple has long been seen as a very easy platform for the non-geeks among us to learn quickly and easily without the configuration and security nightmares that plague the Windows world on occasion (though that’s usually due to market share… but that’s a rant for another day).  Constantly focused on ease-of-use and design Apple makes beautiful and elegant products which are easy to understand, and for the most part to intuit.  A little consistency in documenting things wouldn’t kill them.

Providing people with the information they need to make an informed choice and just maybe understand their computing experience a little bit more is something that all software developers should consider.  It’s nice to have the option to know what people are telling me is a “critical update” so that I can decide for myself.