I may seem too positive about iPad and overly pro-Apple in my writing. I don’t believe I am and I will certainly try not to be. It’s just that they make very polished products that I find fun and easy to use.

In parallel I use Windows at school and also sometimes for work and I don’t think it is bad at all, I actually really like using the new Windows 7. I also try to keep myself updated on the Linux side, which I used to use as my only system for many years, so I hope I can stay objective during the never-ending OS war.
I found out after testing many other systems that OS X fits me personally very well, but I think all systems are quite capable depending on what you are using them for. I guess I just want to say, don’t be a fanboy!

Regardless of whether the issue is about OSes or VI vs Emacs, MS Office vs OpenOffice, PSP vs NDS, it all depends on what we want to do, we should choose the tool which we feel comfortable using, to simply speaking, whatever gets the work done. Computers were made for helping us work, and when we work, we should use the tools which can help us do that. Computers can certainly be a hobby too and in that case it’s nothing wrong to play around with other systems. I just want to say, don’t be a bonehead and a fanboy when it comes to work, use whatever is best for the task! I really annoys me sometimes when I read people that stand by their favorite system no matter what the facts are. There’s way too much of that out there!

I can definitely understand if people have a very strong ideological view, for instance abbot open source, and choose their software according to that, but if you do that don’t say that what you are using is the best, in the case when it clearly is not. Just because you prefer using it doesn’t mean that it is the best, try to see things from other different angles.

I usually don’t rant about things, but I have seen a lot of meaningless comments in the last couple of days about iPad, which made me frustrated. I get the comments about iPad being a completely closed computer, and I agree to a certain extent and find it frustrating, but it seems like people only see the bad side of and shut out everything else, unable to see the true potential of this device.

Open your eyes, and you will soon see.

I have to admit that I have fallen for the hype. The iPad has arrived, and I am very, very excited about it. I am not completely sure about this, but was there really a big hype about this device or did it just exist in the my mind and perhaps in the mind of some other very technologically enthusiastic people.
I think I created most of the hype for myself. This is starting to come very close to the device I have been imagining and wishing for many years. I have been imagining a single device for all purposes for a long time.

I had a discussion with a friend of mine about 3 years ago. The iPhone had just been released, and I argued that eventually we would possess a device that could do almost anything. It would be very light, the size of a phone, and with a holographic display coming out at your command. You would use it for movies, music, reading, for taking photos or shooting video and for word processing and other office related work, and you could do all these things wherever you are. You get back home, it automatically finds your large screen TV and your server computer and it silently makes a backup and you can continue your work from there, at your TV or any other screen and keyboard are just waiting for you to come into reach.
My friend argued that specialized devices always are going to be better at what they do. The question is, how “good” does it need to be?

iPad is very close to what I have imagined, so of course this makes me very excited. I have been aching to get my hands on a keyboard I can connect to my iPod Touch, which have basically been my second computer for the last 2 and a half years. I have been very satisfied with it, but there’s been one large piece missing from it – the ability to do real work on it. This is very much due to the fact that you can’t use a portable keyboard with it. Fortunately, Apple announced at their conference that the iPad can be used together with a keyboard/dock, which basically turns it into a netbook, and you will actually be able to get some work done.

The second and maybe most important feature of the iPad is the ability to use it as a reader and viewer of almost anything, and in my mind most importantly – books. It seems to be the perfect reader. A reader for news, browsing the web, and reading books. Bye, bye paper based world!
I hope and I believe that this is the beginning of the end for everything paper based. Imagine just using a single device to read all your books, all the magazines, all the newspapers and of course anything on the web. Wouldn’t that be great!
I’ve been using my iPod touch for this for some time, and it is sufficient, but the experience is not that great. iPad will probably make the experience so much better, and I think the idea of a paperless world will soon be mainstream, not with the first generation of iPad, but within a couple of years, when the idea has managed to sink into peoples minds.

I’m sorry Michael Scott at Dunder Mifflin, but you will soon have to find a different career! No more dead forests!

Apple Special Event, January 2010
Engadget – iPad Keyboard dock

Writing can be surprisingly difficult if you are not in the right mood for it. What can I do in order to make it easier to write? I realized that I probably have to do it on schedule, to force myself to write. Learning and honing my writing skills was the reason why I started blogging in the first place.

I believe it can be a very useful and handy skill to possess. In business it is of course immensely useful due to various obvious reasons, such as handling clients, promote yourself et cetera. However, it may certainly also come in handy in your personal life. Keeping in contact with old friends, requires discipline in writing, it is however at such times not necessary to write like a master, but it is important to be able to pull yourself up from the laziness and just do it. I am a master at failing in this area. If any of my old friends are reading this, I am truly sorry for my stupidity and I apologize for it.

From here on I will initiate a schedule based form of blogging, at first I will set the bar at once a week, and when I get comfortable with such, I will consider to increase it. So here it is, my resolution for 2010, to pull myself together and write more.
This doesn’t only apply to my writing. My ability to get things done, regarding personal projects, is unfortunately not very high. In the job area it is however not very difficult to get things done. If I am working at a project for a client I have to do it, that’s it, and I cannot fail my client I tell myself, but in my mind it is not so bad to fail myself.

This thinking can turn out to be quite problematic. There are so many things I would like to learn and do, but my self-discipline is sadly not enough to get on with it. I’m in the middle of studying web design, and it is fine as long as I just read and study it, but when it comes to starting and practicing on personal projects my self-discipline drags me down. I need to practice the things I want to learn, not only shallowly touch the surface of everything I study.

You can never get really good at something, until you practice, practice, and finally practice it a lot more. According to Malcolm Gladwell’s best seller Outliers, nobody can become a master at what he do until he practices it for at least 10,000 hours. That means 3 hours every day for 10 years! I have long way to go in many areas!

It is time to get real, time to dig down and get dirty. This is my resolution and promise to myself.

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

I previously wrote about security and privacy issues regarding changing from a desktop based way of working to a web based system. It’s absolutely not all that bad. In fact I am in favor of using web applications for work. There’s a lot of advantages and it creates loads of new possibilities, especially if you have limited resources. As a student without a stable income, Internet and it’s cloud applications can be a goldmine, not to mention the heaps of learning resources out there.

Just to mention a few of the tools I recently stumbled upon, I’ll start with Pixlr, a free to use application which mimics Photoshop and it’s functions. Sure, it’s very basic compared to Photoshop, but it seems to have all of the most common and useful functions which are needed for basic photo editing. It’s quite amazing that you can have access to a desent photo editing tool wherever you have access to Internet, for free and you don’t even need to create an account in order to use it.

Pixlr uses the Freemium model, articulated by venture capitalist Fred Wilson and later more deeply explored by Chris Andresson in his book Free: The Future of a Radical Price from 2009, which is essentially a free version and a paid premium version.
This leads me to another product which uses the same model; Evernote, the product which I’m using right now on my iPod Touch to write this post in. Evernote is a note taking tool to store and gather anything you need to remember. Thing that makes it stand out ftom the crowd is that you can access it basically anywhere. There’s a Mac OS X, Windows, iPhone OS, Android, Blackberry OS and Windows Mobile and WebOS client and if you can’t use one of those you can always access all your data from a web browser. The perfect memo pad if you ask me.

According to the founders of Evernote’s own podcast, their business model is to gain as many users as possible through the free version. If they can get only around 1 percent of those users to sign up for the premium version that’s enough. Did they succeed? They most certainly did. They created an amazing product with now more than 2 million users, and 1.5%(31 000) of those are using the premium version.

Another very useful tool I recently found is Etherpad. A document collaboration tool which lets anyone, whithout an account, create a document and after that anyone who is in possesion of the newly created URL to the document can join and start editing the document at the same time as the creator in real-time. Well, this is similar technology as Google Wave is using, but this one only focuses on the document editing and it does it, in my opinion, way better.

Some other useful web tools are, Kuler – a quite advanced color picker from adobe, 280 Slides – an alternative to PowerPoint and Keynote, Bespin – a editor for software code from Mozilla. Last but not the least all of the Google apps(Gmail, Docs, Reader, Calendar etc.), which of course is immensely useful and absolutely free (except the ads).

The future looks very bright looking at all the great RIAs(Rich Internet Applications) being developed and many times offered for free through the new “Free” economy. From another angle it could also be seen as very dark if we don’t solve the security and privacy issues which is getting increasingly more and more important as time goes by.

http://www.pixlr.com/

http://www.longtail.com (Free: The Future of a Radical Price)

http://www.evernote.com/

http://etherpad.com/

wave.google.com/

http://kuler.adobe.com/

https://bespin.mozilla.com/

http://www.google.com/apps/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Internet_application

What lies in the future of data management? Will all of our information eventually be handled by someone else? Email, essays, work related documents; will we lose control over our important data? Is this good or bad?

My answer is that ideally it is good, but of course nothing can reach an ideal state. With a good system based on security with regards to privacy, it would be very good, but this is still quite far away.

Most people have already lost control over their emails, and most of us have accepted this fact. I use mostly Google Mail for emailing, and I do feel a lot of concern over privacy and security issues regarding personal information which I sometimes carelessly put in my emails, but I always try to keep in mind that there is a possibility that everything I write can be viewed by anyone with access to Internet. Sure, Google provide TSL encrypted connections, but can I completely trust Google. Google is not my family nor even my friend, even if they try to make me think that. I believe that we should not completely trust anyone with our most personal information, and definitely not strangers.

I completely agree with the slogan from X-Files - “Trust no one”. These words, or rather policy should be a fundamental idea for all personal information on Internet. This is absolutely not the case of today’s Internet. In some places the policy is being followed to a certain extent, but in the majority of web sites and especially in more advanced web applications there’s not much regard to the “Trust no one”-policy.

Overall the web model is fundamentally flawed. For instance, JavaScript is in itself horribly broken and beyond repair according to John Graham-Cumming, programmer and co-founder of Electric Cloud, which he wrote in his blog post “JavaScript must die” earlier this year. Viruses can be downloaded and installed very easily to your computer through JavaScript by just visiting a web site, starting the harvest of your personal information and sending it away to various places all over the Internet where it can be sold to any paying customer. This should of course be unacceptable. Even SSL and TSL, which has been a haven of security and privacy, has recently been found to be flawed and open for exploitation, this will however probably be fixed soon, by the normally very thorough engineers behind this protocol.

When Internet is growing larger and getting more entwined with our daily life, we have to start getting more concerned about privacy and security issues. Internet is a place where everything can be accessed and reached by anyone, anywhere on Earth. Therefore, it is more crucial than ever to be concerned about these issues. Trust no one!

JavaScript must die – http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/09/javascript-must-die.html
A Security Vulnerability in SSL – http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-223.htm, http://www.twit.tv/sn223

Yesterday, September 30 , Google sent out 100 000 invites to people who had signed up for it. I didn’t get one.

I’ve been pretty excited over this new and refreshing way of reinventing email. I’m not sure if it’s entirely correct to call it email. It’s more like a combination of instant messaging, email and synchronized document editing. I do believe that eventually something like this will replace email, but for now the number one way of using it will be for collaborate work, for school and businesses. It is comparable to screen sharing but with the difference that many people can edit the same documents at the same time. Obviously, it also seems to be a lot faster than screen sharing.

I’m quite disappointing that I couldn’t get an invite, but I guess I have to be a good boy and patiently wait a while longer until it is released for the public, but of course if someone have an invitation laying around I would gladly accept it. ^^

Glasklart from Max Rudberg

I have to admit one thing – I’m a tweak geek. I really spend too much time tweaking the interface, performance etc. The problem is that I get bored very quickly, I’m constantly changing the background of my desktop. Anyway, I will deal with that problem later.

I love the power that Cydia for the iPhone gives a tweaker. The theme community and the material that’s out there and available through Cydia and Winterboard is huge and the quality of the themes are amazing! I thought I’d share two of my favorite themes. The first is Glasklart, which is Swedish for “Glass Clear” or a better translation would probably be “Crystal Clear”. The icons are completely transparent except for the logos which are always white. This theme looks great if you have a nice wallpaper with matching colors. Second is iElegance, which is a very complete theme that modifies most parts of the interface, from the music controller to the look of the clock app and the settings app.

iElegance from Rob Grohman

I just found some very nice tweaks through Cydia. There’s a mod called WeatherIcon which makes it possible to get live updates of the weather and get it displayed directly onto the icon, so there’s no need to open the app. Pretty cool I say! It’s also possible to get the icon of the clock app to show the time in real-time through a mod called LiveClock.

Well enough of this ultra ultra-geeky and actually pretty meaningless tech-talk for today. It’s pretty fun though, but I really should try to do something more productive with my time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jailbreak_%28iPhone%29
http://www.maxthemes.com/
http://modmyi.com/info/ielegance.php
http://www.saurik.com/id/1
http://www.saurik.com/id/9
http://blog.iphone-dev.org/

Finally it’s here, firmware 3.0. For some reason I’ve been quite excited about this update. Ever since I saw the keynote earlier this year, I’ve been having high expectations on this version. Probably because the long-awaited copy and paste function.

I got it installed yesterday on my iPod Touch. It’s not really that much different but it is indeed a nice change. It feels a bit more stable and also snappier. A couple of new features has been introduced, such as Cut, Copy & Paste, which is a very, very welcome change. It really took too long time for this feature to arrive. It’s really a very good and user-friendly implementation of such a function. Very fast and easy to use. Just double tap on the word you want to select. If you want to make a longer selection, just press in one of the corners of the selection and drag it out. It can’ really be easier and it leaves me with nothing else to wish for.

A search function, Spotlight, has also appeared, which is quite useful. I just wish it would be possible to search the web with the same function.

Overall, this is really the most satisfying upgrade of the iPhone version of OS X so far. I haven’t really encountered any bugs yet. So far, so good.

OS X 10.5 Leopard

I reinstalled OS X Leopard yesterday from an external usb connected hard drive. It’s been about one year ago since I installed Leopard for the first time. 1 year is a pretty long time for me when it comes to this issue. I probably didn’t need to do this, I guess it’s mostly a psychological thing for me, but it feels pretty good doing a clean install of my system. Everything worked quite good before, but after cleaning the system,  things seem to run a little bit smoother, at least that’s what I’d like to believe. ^^  When it comes to my computer I’m a total control freak! Anyway I thought I’d go through the process of how to do this.

Step 2 - Create the needed partition

1. You need a disk image(a dmg file of OS X Leopard).
2. Create a new partition on your external drive with preferably 8 GB of storage space. Do this by opening up disk utility. Select your disk and choose the Partition tab. Select the number of partitions you want to create. Click the Options button and choose GUID Partition Table in order to make it bootable. Change the size of the partition that you are going to put OS X on to 8 GB. Use the Mac OS Extended(Journaled) format and then click apply.
3. Now select the 8 GB partition that you just created and choose the Restore tab. The “Source” should be your OS X image
   

   Step 3 - Use Restore in order to put the OS X installation files on your hard drive

   file(dmg) and the “Destination” should be your 8 GB partition. Just drag-and-drop the partition from the left side into the Destination text box. Open up finder, locate your OS X image file and drag-and-drop it into the Source text box. Click Restore.

4. Be sure that you have everything backed up before you proceed.
5. Restart your computer. Press and hold the option(alt)-key immediately to start the boot manager. Now you should be able to see your internal hard drive to the left and your newly created OS X install partition to the right. Select the install partition and from now on it will just be as installing from a DVD.

I should note that if you have your external disks connected to a USB hub you might not be able to boot from it. I had this problem and it took me a while to figure it out. I have two 500 GB hard drives inside a case. They are acting as two seperate drives, not using RAID. So they are basically connected to a USB hub. Because of this configuration I could not get it to boot from this disk. I couldn’t see anything except my internal drive in the boot manager, really annoying problem. Well eventually I figured it out and I opened up the case and just disconnected one of the hard drives. I connected it again to my computer and now everything worked fine. I have no idea why it can’t boot when connected to a hub, and I’m really curious to find out.

I think it’s really nice having the OS X installation media on a partition on my hard disk. If something happens you will have fast access to it, you will have a backup of your Installation DVD, and you don’t have to use the your sensitive DVD original. Another big benefit is that it installs faster then from the DVD.

It’s Golden week. The period of the Japanese year containing the most national holidays. April 29th – Emperor Showa’s birthday, May 3rd Constitution Memorial Day, May 4th – Greenery Day and May 5th – Children’s Day. For our school this means that we have a break from the 29th of April until the 6th of May. Feels pretty good.

Unfortunately I don’t have any money to spend, so I can’t really do anything special. I also have to spend time moving from next week, which is always an unpleasant experience. My current place is way to far away from school. I have to commute about 2 hour and 30 minutes every which is not very healthy for the wallet. The place I move to will only be 30 min away with express train.

I have to many things and I will move to an even smaller room than I have now which means trouble for me. I hate the new economy! 8 months ago I had 16 m², then I had to move to this place which is 11 m² and now I will have 8m². I miss my first place, it really was the best!  I’ll get the keys to the new place tomorrow. Have to start moving things then.