This Old Blog

Polaroid of my past You're looking at something I'd completely forgotten about, something I built around 1980. It's a custom perf board I built on a slab of aircraft-grade aluminum, on which I wired a complete 6502-based embedded computer. It has 4,096 bytes of static RAM, 16K of EPROM (2716), a combo-peripheral chip that included two serial ports and two eight-bit-wide parallel I/O ports, a fully decoded keypad and a six digit display broken into four digits for an address and two for data, all in hex. I was proud of those displays. They were special HP multi-segmented alphanumeric displays that read ASCII bytes. I had them display hexadecimal and special words, and then got them to scroll text. Although the keypad looks like it will only handle hex digit input, I had added software so that if you held the key down it would give you a display of the function and an alt function. Primary and alt key functionality was toggled by the tiny switch on the top left. The cal...

Apple's iPhone 5 This is turning into a Weekend of Decision for me. First I'm wrestling with what kind of 35mm DSLR to move to, now it's a new smartphone and provider. I got on the new smartphone kick because I've just about had enough of the poor customer support and lousy service coming out of T-Mobile. Saturday's latest shenanigans with T-Mobile were the last straw. In September 2011 I purchased a T-Mobile hotspot. I got this for my youngest daughter so that she could have internet connectivity at the house she'd moved into, as well as being able to carry it with her around Tallahassee. In spite of the glowing ads, service has been mediocre at best, but at least it gave her connectivity to check her email and Facebook. In late August she finally found a decent (read: affordable) wired connectivity solution in Tallahassee, so she didn't need the wireless hotspot anymore. I called T-Mobile to turn off the mobile hotspot feature only to discover that i...

I wanted to wait a while and let the dust settle before wading in with my own not-so-unique comments regarding Microsoft's Surface tablets/slates/whatever-you-want-to-label-them. Current commentary is deeply divided over the obvious business perspective about how Microsoft had to do this because the OEMs had failed vs the perspective of labeling what Microsoft did as " one of the largest and most unethical industrial espionage campaigns of the last few decades ." I'm not here to take one side or the other, but to point out examples from Microsoft's long history why I believe these new machines are doomed to failure. I have long experience of Microsoft products stretching back to MS-DOS and further back to the original Altair Basic for CP/M and the Microsoft Z-80 Softcard for the Apple II, forward through a whole series of mice, keyboards, and X-Box gaming consoles as well as their ill-fate Zune player. But I also remember, from the software side, Blackcomb and...

MacBook Pro with Yellow Lab screen saver Last Sunday, a day before Apple's WWDC, we purchased a 13" MacBook Pro from the Mall at Millenia Apple store to replace her dying four-year-old white MacBook. Before we put money down we asked the salesperson if we could return the MacBook if another version came out the following day that was better than what we purchased. The answer was 'yes' as long as we made any returns or swaps within 14 days after purchase. So we made our purchase, transferred the account via Time Machine from the older MacBook to the newer Pro, made some minor tweaks to the Pro, and for the next week my wife was a happy MacBook Pro user. Sure enough, less than 24 hours later on the west coast, Apple introduced upgrades to the MacBook Pros, including the base 13" model. We waited until today to head back to the Apple store to attempt an exchange. Before we left for the Apple store I made another Time Machine backup of the new Pro, to make sure ...

MacBook Pro with Yellow Lab screen saver So my wife finally decided she'd had enough with the four-year-old MacBook. In her dear sweet hands it had gone through hell and back. It had been dropped, banged, had soy spilled all over it, traveled across much of Florida and other points in the U.S., and had served up yeoman duty with Microsoft Office 2004. As a retired English professor, my wife is often called upon to practice her English skills in support of those who lack such skills. It was her window on the world. In a pinch it served as a platform for simple post processing for my E-300 and E-3 when we were on travel together. As good as it was, it couldn't handle the continuous physical onslaught as well as the advancing software that was slowly larded onto the aging platform. Right now it has Lion installed on it, and that was probably a mistake. It was fine with Snow Leopard, but Lion finally placed a high burden on the Core 2 Duo that came with the machine. After one...

On the way into work, sitting in traffic behind a dump truck, in a mood as dark as the overcast morning sky, I slowly became aware of the Apple logo right in the middle of the battered rear gate. It was all I could do to move fast enough, to grab my camera out of the seat next to me, get the lens cap off, focus, and finally grab the exposure. I quickly got around the truck and into clearer traffic, but I kept thinking of the Apple logo on that beat-up, heavily used dump truck. It slowly grew into something of a metaphor for me about today's Apple. About As Big As They Come Before I start trashing Apple, let me get the obvious out of the way first. Apple's making money hand over fist, selling crazy numbers of iPhones and iPads, always going up, quarter after quarter, year after year. Their stock valuation had them worth more than the country of Poland in February. And most significantly, tickets to WWDC 2012 sold out in two hours . At US$1,599/each . Just as just about ever...

Olympus E-P2 and Panasonic 20mm This has been a very busy week at work. I always carry a camera with me, the E-P2 with a prime on the front. Zoom use with the E-P2 is now a rare exception with me. All photos in this post were taken with primes. My wife's Mac had to go back to the Apple store because the WiFi was still malfunctioning. While we were turning it in for a deeper inspection and possible repair we also noted that the screen's backlight was intermittent. We left it to fix that problem as well as look at the WiFi issue. On the way out I happened to see this particular father-and-son tableau (I'm assuming it was a father and son), with the son up on the table and playing with an iPad. The adult seemed transfixed by either another device or something else equally small. He's clutching his wallet at the same time he's concentrating on the other item next to his wallet. Is he thinking of buying the little one an iPad? The week was spend with me visitin...

My wife's Macbook is definitely showing its age. Purchased back in 2008, it has gone through hell and back in her dear sweet hands. It's survived drops and soy milk spills and trips around the state on various vacations. We tried to protect its white plastic exterior with an electric pink shell, but it's been broken so many times it's held on with duct tape. The Mac's latest problem seems to be a consistent WiFi failure. Just about every morning Airport is disabled, and you can't enable it. The only way to get it working is to reboot the Macbook, then enter in the house SSID and password to get back on the network. My wife was getting Real Tired of all that, and I can certainly understand that part of it. So she called and scheduled an appointment with the Geniuses over at the Mall of Millenia's Apple Store. When we arrived at the store it was before 10am, the regular opening time. Our appointment was scheduled for 9:30am. We got to the front door a sty...

One of the reasons for carrying a camera like the Pen is because it's small, discreet, and non-intimidating — everything a full-blown DSLR isn't. So when the Wife and I went out for a late-afternoon lunch at the local Chipotle (where else), I started to practice discreet "street" photography with the E-P2 and the Panasonic 20mm. The key to this kind of photography using this kind of camera is to hold it in a non-photographer stance, meaning you don't call attention to yourself by lifting the camera up to your face, or putting on the V-F2 and focusing with your eye like, well, a DSLR. Instead I hold the body non-chilantly down around my chest, and just far enough out to see the screen out of the corner of my eye. If I'm standing near something like a waist-high wall, I lean against it casually and make sure the lens is pointing out, then reach over with my thumb and trip the shutter. I can do that one-handed because I have fairly large hands. Over the deca...

Over the last 24 hours I've been running into this huge banner ad from Apple on a number of websites I visit. Presented here are two screen captures from Wired and Yahoo! I've soured on Apple over the last 12 months or so, after realizing just exactly the kind of limited universe Apple has in store for those who consume their iDevices, especially the iPhone, iPad, and iPod. As a consequence I stay away from the Apple store and those sites that tend to advertise Apple. Until I started to hit these huge animated banner ads. While I'm not surprised to see such ads on the Wired site, I was a bit surprised to see it on Yahoo! Regardless, I'm now very curious as to why Apple has to advertise for the iPod touch. Has the bottom completely dropped out of iPod sales? At least that's what the press has been reporting since July here , here , and here . With the touch being the premier iPod, it makes some sense to try and boost its sales. It's the only way to buy an iPh...

In a word: manners. In particular, cell-phone etiquette. How many times have you been annoyed by somebody talking on their cellphone, at some very inappropriate time and/or place? With Siri/Iris/etc, not only are you given multiple opportunities to hear the caller talk loudly about personal issues you really didn't need to know about, you get even more opportunities to hear the smartphone owner ask all sorts of questions, thus increasing verbal pollution. And if you're really unlucky you get to hear Siri/Iris answer back in their sweet, artificial voice. Oh what fun. The more I think this through, the more I believe that any voice-operated input on a smartphone is a boondoggle, yet another useless gotta-have-it-feature created by cynical marketeers for a gullible buying public. Via: Cell Phones

To hear folks enthuse about Apple's latest wünderapp, Siri, you would have thought Apple had produced an application so sublime that nothing could stand before its sheer awesomeness, so powerful that it could slay a multi-billion dollar technology titan such as Google. Or at least that's what Eric Jackson of Forbes would desperately like for you to believe . The problem with such prognostications is how easily they look like the ravings of a fool under the harsh light of reality. For example, this past week every instance of Siri stopped working for five hours because of an outage somewhere in the iCloud. I find it amazing as well as disconcerting that for Siri to properly function it needs to be eternally connected to another service external to the iPhone. And that's not good, especially when it stops and delivers the equivalent of " I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that " when it looses access to its back-end services. But before I continue...

Website: http://www.occupyorlando.org/ Facebook Link: http://www.facebook.com/OccupyOrlandoFL Today was supposed to be the start of another big rainmaker, so the Occupy Orlando crew spent the day setting up large tents and moving everything underneath. Everyone was, as usual, in good spirits. The grounds of Senator Beth Johnson Park are clean and well-kept. The largest tent appears to be a communal tent for about a dozen or so folks, with a table on one side holding food and water. There's a smaller media tent that's been up and running since the beginning. It's from that location where a small dedicated group keeps Occupy Orlando's web presence up-to-date. If the weather does get rough I hope they've got weather-proof containers to stow their gear in. I should note that everything is Apple. I came across two familiar faces again this afternoon. And so I sat down and we talked a bit, and got to know each other a little better. At least they don't think...

Image by Jonathan Mak Long It's now 48 hours since The Steve shufflel'd off his mortall iCoile. During that period I've been asked, more than once, how long Apple would last now that Steve was gone. Every time my honest answer was "I don't know. If I did know I'd invest accordingly and become a millionaire." So, with that in mind, I'm going to speculate on the future of Apple. Not that it'll make me rich, but because I have my own opinion as to where Apple is and where it's going. But first, a quick review of the past. Apple has already gone through a period of Stevelessness from 1985 through 1997. Apple's first golden age occurred during this period from 1989 to 1991. But after that heady period Apple began to slide downwards both in terms of profitability and relevance. It was during this slide that the OS debacles began and the Newton was released. Product flops and missed deadlines took the luster off the Apple, which led to a ...

1955 - 2011 It's taken awhile for the death of The Steve to sink in. I never knew the man, but certainly knew the fruits of his genius stretching back to the Apple II. It was the Apple II that helped me finish up my engineering degree. I was always captivated by the 6502 and the products it was used in. During my second attempt at an engineering degree the school lab where I was toiling away on a project had several along a back bench. I was building my own 6502-based embedded system. In order to program mine I would start by writing 6502 mnemonics on multi-column paper and then hand-assemble them on the same page. I'd then walk over to the Apple II and type the resultant hex codes into a chunk of its memory, then use a third-party EPROM programmer to burn the buffer onto the EPROM. I'd then pull the EPROM, plug it into my little system, power it up and debug all the functionality. Lather, rinse, and repeat until it was fully debugged. It wasn't until much later ...

Let me state up front that my original love for Apple has turned to ashes. I could spend the rest of the post cataloging all the reasons why in excruciating detail, but it wouldn't matter. I'd be falling victim yet again to the old geek flaw that the way I see the world is the way It Should Be Seen by Everyone Else. And the world just doesn't work that way. There's also the the following incontrovertible facts: Q1 2011 : Apple reported revenue of $26.74 billion and profits of $6 billion, or $6.43 per share. Revenue was up 71 percent from a year ago, and earnings were up 78 percent. Analysts were expecting revenue of $24.38 billion and earnings per share of $5.38. Q2 2011 : Apple reported revenue of $24.67 billion and profits of $5.99 billion, or $6.40 per share. Analysts were expecting revenue of $23.38 billion and earnings per share of $5.37. Apple can't make product fast enough to satisfy the market. Even with the Japanese 9.0 earthquake and resultant tsunami...

It was only a matter of time before I finally figured out how to connect my T-Mobile MyTouch 4G to my Dell D630 running Windows XP SP3, and began to follow the path of Android development enlightenment. What follows are my notes and general observations about getting my handset connected to my computer. Step a : Forget about finding anything useful by googling for it on the web. Everything you need to know about connecting an Android handset can be found through Google's Android developer's pages, starting with downloading the SDK . The page presents various SDK download packages for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. We're talking about Windows development, so we'll concentrate on the two packages you can download for Windows. Step b : Install the SDK. At this point in time there are two packages, android-sdk_r09-windows.zip and installer_r09-windows.exe , which is recommended by Google. I'm an 'old timer' when it comes to installing the SDK, so I always ...

Babylon 5, Season 5, Episode 14 "Meditations on the Abyss" You're looking at a frame capture from my second generation iPod playing an episode from Babylon 5 via the Netflix application. Under normal playing conditions you wouldn't see all the soft controls, but I had them up to provide context. With the controls hidden, the view of the image is clean and covers the screen. It is amazing what such "old tech" can accomplish. My iPod 2G is running iOS 4.2.1, and because it's just a second generation device, key features are disabled. But that doesn't matter. I can listen to music, stream video flawlessly via WiFi, play games, surf the web, or read news sites directly, such as NPR. All that capability, and more, resting lightly in the palm of my hand. Even old Apple technology sets a highly competitive bar to meet. I say this in the context of a review of the Barnes and Noble Nook Color I wrote. In spite of the fact that the Nook Color is ...

Sunset on an era. I had an interesting comment show up on one of my posts. The reader said, in part: I know it has been a while since you ranted something on Linux... That's an interesting observation. It really has been a while since I ranted about Linux. Before I became a Linux ranter I was a happy user, writing a thread of positive advocacy pieces on Linux, especially OpenSUSE (10.2). I branched out with Ubuntu (7.2) and Mandriva. But in the end I grew tired of watching my system grow less useful and more broken with each new distribution release. My patience with this madness came to an official end on March 16, 2009, when I finally declared I'd had enough with OpenSUSE 11.1, and Linux in general. To quote Béranger at the time, I defected from Linux back to Windows as a rational act. Just a few months after that, Linus Torvalds had this to say about Microsoft and hating on Microsoft : I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Mic...