Three themes encompass the various improvements embodied in the iPad 2 and its accessories: speed, power, and ergonomics.

I don’t think I need to explain “speed” at all. By “power” I mean the ability to do things which weren’t possible or practical before; this includes the cameras, the gyroscope, the Verizon-compatible 3G radio, and the faster CPU and GPU — there’s some overlap between speed and power. I’m excited about those themes, but they’re pretty straightforward. I suspect that “ergonomics” requires more explanation.

The iPad 2 has many ergonomic improvements: lighter, thinner, rounded edges, flatter back, and the Smart Covers. These advances together will make the iPad 2 a significantly better experience than the first iPad. Being lighter and thinner means it’s easier to grasp in one hand with less fatigue over time. The flatter back means it’ll work much better on a flat surface such as a table or desk without a case or stand — the curved back of the first iPad made a case or stand essential. The Smart Covers will also enable more frequent use of the iPad without a case, because they’re so quick and easy to remove.

Combined together, we have a device which will be much easier and more pleasant to use without a case, more likely to be used without a case, and which when held in one hand will frequently be significantly lighter.

I understand why Apple wouldn’t market the iPad 2 using these themes; they’re too abstract for marketing. People generally want to hear about concrete improvements in new models. But there’s value in identifying and understanding the themes embodied in a new version of a product, so as to be able to make a holistic comparison with the older version.

Some of the really savvy new media efforts like Flipboard are exciting, but after the initial “wow” factor wears off, these apps mainly serve to remind me that there’s already too much good stuff to read out there, and that my life is slipping away from me in an infinite stream of interesting bits about smart animals, dumb criminals, outrageous celebs, shiny objects, funny memes, scientific discoveries, economic developments, etc..

I only skimmed the article, and only half-agree, but this quote stood out. It really resonates with me.

Sure, I could have picked up a MiFi portable WWAN hotspot from Sprint or Verizon, but the service plans for those cost at least $50 a month, and generally more. As frustrated as I am with AT&T — their phone and data service is atrocious in Manhattan, and where the hell is tethering? — the data plans that they’re offering for the iPad are attractive and even a little innovative. $15 a month for occasional usage and $30 a month for unlimited are both very reasonable prices for the convenience and utility that this service (hopefully/usually) provides.

So, why did I upgrade from the wifi-only iPad to the 3G model?

First and foremost, it’s because I love using the iPad — it’s the future of computing! — and it was very frustrating and disappointing to not have the ubiquitous networking which has been key to the transformative nature of the iPhone. Carrying around this thing from the future and having to think about when, whether, and where it could use the network, the backbone of the future, was so dissonant it was almost silly. And it definitely led me to take my tablet out and about with me less than I would have otherwise.

Now that my tablet does have ubiquitous network, I’ll have it with me more often, and I’ll be able to use it in many more situations. And that’s exciting, because you know what? I really love using this thing. I also have a MacBook Pro and an iPhone 3G, but right now the iPad is my computing device of choice. It doesn’t fit every use case, but whenever I want to do something, if it can be done on the iPad, that’s what I opt to use. Its touch interface and its form factor are just so much more engaging, rewarding, and relaxing than a laptop or desktop, and the larger screen and faster brain make it much more powerful, useful, and relaxing than an iPhone. Sure, I could have written and posted something this long with my phone, and I have, but it’s a bit of a pain on that little screen.

(I know I wrote “relaxing” twice in the previous paragraph. Trust me, it was intentional. That’s a theme I’ve been thinking about, and if I can find the time to write it, it’ll be another post.)

Other reasons that I upgraded:

• A MiFi would be one more thing for me to carry around, have to keep track of, charge, and at some point lose.
• The MiFi data plans cost ~$60, and that’s way too much to pay for occasional usage. I’m usually around a wifi network I can use; I only need WWAN every once in a while, and AT&T’s iPad plans are perfect for that. Not only are they affordable, they’re month-to-month plans with no contract — I can always cancel at any time if I don’t need or want the service.
• My previous iPad already has a new home at my company. That’s fortunate; not everyone who might like to upgrade has such a convenient and affordable avenue to do so.

I’ll be arriving in New York soon, so it’s time to wrap this up and post.

Good night, and good luck — from the future!

Kirn has good points, and I don’t necessarily disagree with any of them. But as for ports, I think he might be missing something: wireless. The primary use of cables and ports is to connect two devices together so they can transfer data. (Control signals count as data too.) I wouldn’t be surprised if Steve Jobs has decided that most people don’t need USB anymore and that wireless is ready to replace it in most cases.

This could be a recurrence of what occurred in 1998 when Steve Jobs unleashed a storm of controversy by introducing the iMac without a floppy disk drive. He started the shift from using floppy disks for data transfer to using USB, optical disks, and networking. Today he may be finishing what he started; catalyzing the final shift from physical media to using radio waves for all data transfer.

Wi-Fi (802.11) and Bluetooth are at this point nearly ubiquitous, and the chips and controllers which implement them are now very inexpensive. Wi-fi is capable of transfer speeds similar to USB 2.0, which might allow it to suffice for transferring large volumes of data and connecting devices via Bluetooth is pretty simple these days.

Both standards also have recently added new features which can make connecting faster, simpler, and more secure; Apple could implement these features to make these technologies even more workable as replacements for USB.

This shift, from cables to wireless connections, is by no means a fait accompli, but it’s well under way, and will probably turn out to be a net win for most people.

I want to learn, at least at a basic level, how to build java web applications (coming from a .net background).

Meaning, I would like to be able to build, deploy a simple cms type application from the ground up.

What exactly do I need to learn?

Tomcat seems to be a good web server for Java.

What options are there for the web? I know there is hibernate for an ORM.

Does java have MVC? what about JSP? can MVC and JSP be together? beans?

Maybe a book that covers all of these?

And an answer popped into my head:

I consider most of the traditional Java web development options to be pretty heavy-weight, and there some good alternatives:

• Play is an MVC framework which is focused on being lightweight, straightforward, and enabling rapid development — while sticking with pure Java, as opposed to a more dynamic JVM-based language. It’s fairly new but already impressive, and a good community has built up around it quickly.

• Grails is an MVC framework, inspired by Ruby on Rails, which is written in, and uses, Groovy, a Java-based scripting language. Grails is mature, robust, and widely respected, with a strong community. Groovy is basically a superset of Java, with better syntax and some great features such as closures, so learning it is a great way to learn Java.

• If you need/want to build RESTful web sites/services/applications, Restlet is a fantastic framework — I’m a big fan. It’s simple, straightforward, and yet flexible. Great community too.

• Google’s App Engine is an interesting option as well. It’s hosted, which may or may not be of interest, but it has a fairly simple API, and a good SDK.

I’m sure there are others, but these are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

Good luck, and have fun!

source

I just figured out that my voicemail hasn’t worked for a while… a quick Google search, and doh! I realize it’s been since I set up the AT&T tethering hack. And yeah, that’s about 10 weeks… once I finally got it fixed, 28 messages popped up. Oops!

It took me a while, but eventually I got my Visual Voicemail working again. I’m recording the steps here for posterity.

Hint: if your Visual Voicemail ever seems like it might not be working, you can always access your voicemail by switching to the Keypad and holding down the “1″ key.

At this point, there are a bunch of different ways to install a tethering hack — basically, there’s multiple hacks. I can’t even find the link to the hack I originally used. So, YMMV.

Here’s what worked for me and might work for you:

1. Launch the Settings app
2. Click on General → Network → Cellular Data Network
3. Under “Visual Voicemail”, make sure that the value of APN is acds.voicemail If it isn’t, make it so.
4. Turn off the phone
5. Follow the steps in this article to reset your voicemail password
6. Turn the phone back on
7. Once the phone boots, open the Phone app, and click on the Voicemail tab
8. Hopefully, the Voicemail tab will be showing the setup screen. Enter a password and set up a greeting, and once you’re done, all your queued up voicemail messages should appear.

On the upside, I’ll never look an excuse-to-upgrade-horse in the mouth!

I had a text file that I wanted to explicitly track versions of — I use Time Machine for incremental backup, which is great, but doesn’t always give me precise enough control of the snapshots, and I don’t always have the snapshots available. Once I read Aristotle’s essay, it only took me a few minutes to download and install Mercurial, and then I started tracking my file with three simple commands: hg init; hg add *; hg commit -m "initial". Quick, easy, and effective. From that point on, my folder was also a repository, and I could track specific revisions of my files by simply typing hg commit -m "update" at any point.

What I think is the killer realization here is that it is now super easy to make any folder into a repository, and instantly start tracking versions of its contents. I’ve used Subversion to make local repositories, and track local files in the past — and it really is many more steps, and much more work. It’s also messier, because the repository and the working copy must be separate entities — you have to think about where the repository should live, as opposed to the actual stuff, the working copy. With a DVSC, no such dichotomy exists. The repository and the actual stuff are one and the same. You can move them, zip them, email them — as long as the metadata directory is preserved (for example, .hg or .git), the folder remains a repository.

I’m thankful to Aristotle for helping me get past the initial barrier to entry, and start actually using a DVCS. I’m looking forward to learning more about them, and using them even more going forward.

(Bonus tip: on OS X, some applications save their data using a special type of file called a “package”, which is actually a directory with a special flag. One example is OmniGraffle, which I use frequently. Because these “files” are actually directories, they can be easily made into self-versioning files with their own self-contained repositories. Just navigate to the directory and run the commands above! From that point on, the file will be a repository and can track its own versions. Pretty useful!)

(I can’t explain exactly why I decided to try Mercurial first, before Git or Bazaar. I’ve read many comparisons of them, and something about those comparisons just made me want to try it. I’m not sure exactly how, but I had built up the impression that Mercurial was somehow simpler, cleaner, more elegant, and more approachable than Git or Bazaar. I don’t know if that’s actually true, but the impression was enough that that’s where I started.)

(Aristotle’s mention of “mental overhead” as a decisive factor in using one system over another is something I’ve been thinking about lately as well, although I’ve used the more unwieldy “cognitive overhead.”)

I’d love to see it have:

• A Blu-Ray/DVD/CD drive
• A TV tuner and DVR functionality
• Safari — now that the iPhone Remote app can display a keyboard for the Apple TV’s text interfaces, and could easily support pointer control, there’s no real impediment to a full-blown web browser — preferably including Flash, so sites like Hulu and Vimeo would function
• An app store — why not? The Apple TV is really just a computer with TV-optimized ports, drivers, and UI. (Similar to how the iPhone is really just a computer with mobile-optimized hardware and software.) Once the iPhone Remote app enabled a keyboard and pointer anywhere, it’d be pretty great to be able to browse and install third-party apps, just as on the iPhone. Apple already has the infrastructure for this; releasing an Apple TV SDK would be no sweat.
• Dashboard widget support. TVs and widgets will go together as naturally as peanut butter and jelly.
• An easy way to copy music and video to the device without having to use iTunes
• Broader media format support — it should support divx, mkv, vorbis, theora, flac, etc.
• The ability to plug in a memory card — preferably to the built-in SD-card reader — and display a slide show of the photos and videos on the card, or copy them to the ATV
• User-upgradeable hard drive. Don’t get me started on this.
• A true sleep mode which uses nearly zero energy
• The ability to display the photos and videos on my phone, via wifi, without copying them first

I see all these things as easily attainable. I’d buy it!

According to the post Critical Mac OS X Java Vulnerabilities by Landon Fuller, via Simon Willison, there’s a critical vulnerability in every Java installation which Apple includes in OS X, which can allow an attacker to easily run any arbitrary command on your system by simply loading a Java applet in a web page you visit.

(For our purposes, Java is a web browser plugin which, similar to Flash, lets your browser do advanced things like upload photos, etc.)

Therefore it’s recommended to disable Java in all of your web browsers until this is fixed.

The easy way to do this is to open the preferences of your browsers and find the checkbox labeled “Enable Java” and uncheck it.

However, I wasn’t comfortable merely doing that, and I don’t think anyone else should be, either. Not only do you have to remember to do this in every single browser you might ever use — including Fluid based browsers, browsers embedded in RSS readers, etc — but it’s always possible for the preference to get reset somehow. And some apps which use embedded browsers may not make that preference available at all.

Instead, I recommend moving the Java plugin from its usual location, which will prevent all Webkit-based browsers, including those embedded in other apps, Firefox, and Camino, from loading any Java applet, even if the preference isn’t available in one of those apps, or gets reset.

These two terminal commands will accomplish this:

(Please note: I have tested this solution only using a fully updated 64-bit Intel Mac as of today, using Safari 4 Beta, Camino 2 Beta, Firefox 3.5 Beta, and Fluid 0.9.6. I make no warranties or guarantees of any kind, and I disclaim any responsibility for any damage done to your computer, now or in the future, whether you follow my advice or not.)

Command One:
sudo mkdir "/Library/Internet Plug-Ins, disabled"


Command Two:
sudo mv "/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/JavaPluginCocoa.bundle" "/Library/Internet Plug-Ins, disabled/"

If you don’t know how to run terminal commands:

1. Trigger Spotlight by clicking on the magnifying glass in the upper-right-hand corner of your screen
2. type in “Terminal”
3. Once the application Terminal appears in the results, make sure it’s highlighted, then hit Enter to launch it
4. Switch to your browser, copy the first command into your clipboard
5. Switch back to Terminal and paste the line in
6. Hit Enter
7. You will probably be prompted to enter your password. Do so.
   • It’s possible that after this step you’ll see an error message, something to the effect of you not being in the sudoers file, and this will be reported. Don’t worry about this. It just means that someone set up your Mac so you’re running with a standard user account, not an administrator account. This is A Good Thing.
   • If that does happen, you should contact the person who set up your Mac and have them help you complete these steps.
8. As long as you don’t see any errors, the command probably worked
9. Copy-and-paste and run the second command
10. Quit Terminal

Restart your browsers for the change to take effect

Once you’ve done that, please take a moment to tell Apple that they’ve dropped the ball on this vulnerability, and they need to fix it ASAP. The best way to do that is by posting a message to Apple using their OS X feedback form. If you have the time, try to post something about it publicly too, on your blog, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Even just a link to the article: Critical Mac OS X Java Vulnerabilities and “Apple, fix this now!” would be great.

I love that Instant Netflix is a subscription model, where we pay X dollars per month for our subscription – as little as $9 – and that includes instant streaming of any movie or TV show in their instant catalog. While I was never a fan of the model for music, such as Rhapsody, it works great for movies and TV shows, because I’m much less likely to watch a movie over and over again than I am to listen to a song over and over again. In other words, I want to build a collection of music which I own, but I just want to be able to watch movies and TV shows once or occasionally twice.

It got me thinking, so I posted this comment:

Good points, Rich. I’d like to note that there’s a related issue: backup. Most people don’t backup their data, even that which is crucial to them. I think the basic reason for that is that it’s always been way to complicated to do so. Apple’s Time Machine offers some hope in that area; it boils backup down to its essence, and hides the complexity, so average people can backup without too many hassles. And that’s great. But consider that it took twenty-four years — from the release of the first Mac to that of OS X 10.5 Leopard with Time Machine — for us to come up with a simple, reliable, effective, and affordable solution to desktop backup for average people — and it’s still not built-in to the most common OS. And — the irony — just when we’re finally on the cusp of slaying that dragon — at least for Mac users — the game goes ahead and changes! Now people are keeping their data off of their desktops, on other “people’s” computers! Now we have this entirely new dimension to the problem, and once again, it’s being approached haphazardly, obliquely, and without coordination.

You focus here (as you frequently do) on the divide between the web and the desktop. That’s one way of looking at the problem. But if you look at it from the perspective of backup, you could re-frame the problem as a rule: important data should always exist in more than one place. And by “place”, I mean “responsible party” — I’m sure Google has a strong backup plan, but if they hold the only copy of one’s data, and their system goes down, that means that the data is at least unavailable for some period of time.

I try to follow this rule, which is why most of my “cloud” data is mirrored on my laptop, and I’ve got multiple geo-redundant backups of my laptop. I set up a desktop mail client to synchronize with my Gmail accounts using IMAP, which means I have not only a backup of my mail, but a local working copy — if Gmail goes down, I can still read and send mail.

The thing is, that’s all well and good for me, but I’m a geek. I have no illusions that we can expect average people to set up or use such a setup. So I agree with you that it’s time for the cloud service providers to step up and try to address this problem, on the behalf of their users. Gmail, for example, should provide a “Gmail Desktop” application, which would store all of a user’s mail locally and synchronize with the service. When on their own computer, a user could use the app, which would automatically provide the benefits of backup and offline use, on the fly, in the background; when away from their own computer they could still, of course, use the web interface.

Thanks for the interesting thoughts!

I tried a lot of things: upgrading the firmware, rebooting in safe mode, creating a new network location, deactivating and reactivating the connections — nothing worked. In the end, I found the answer with a combination of Google and sheer luck. As I was troubleshooting, all along I was searching with Google for some clue to what was going on — using phrases like “OS X DHCP won’t work”, “Mac can’t get IP address”, etc. Google usefully displays snippets of text from each search result below the result title. Luckily, in one of those, I noticed the name “configd”. That tickled my memory, so I searched for “configd”. The man page starts with “The configd daemon is responsible for many configuration aspects of the local system.” And after skimming this page, I developed a theory that configd was responsible for obtaining an IP address via DHCP. And I suddenly remembered that when we had first booted up the laptop when we brought it home, I had changed the Firewall mode to Set access for specific services and applications – and that it had immediately popped up a dialog asking whether we wanted to allow or deny incoming connections to configd! I surmised that we must have clicked “deny”, which must have broken configd.

The hypothesis was easy to test: I just turned the firewall off (the setting labeled Allow all incoming connections) and tried to obtain an IP address, and it worked. Problem solved! As usual, there was a reason — me!

So the moral of the story is: don’t deny incoming connections to configd.

A useful tip, found here: to reset the OS X 10.5 Leopard firewall back to factory settings, enter the following command in the Terminal: sudo cp /usr/libexec/ApplicationFirewall/com.apple.alf.plist /Library/Preferences/com.apple.alf.plist

Finally, I just want to say: the Leopard firewall confuses me. I have issues with it. Maybe it’s just me. But maybe it isn’t.

Pros:

• great sound
• highly custamizable fit
• good passive attenuation of ambient sound
• separate microphone and control button makes both more convenient and effective
• high quality materials and construction
• iPhone-specific plug

Cons:

• can hear cord bouncing around as I walk, I think this is called subharmonics, I find it really annoying, but I think it’s a general problem with all “canalphones”, not just these.
• The phones seal really well, and don’t feed any of my voice into the audio, so I can’t hear myself speak, so I end up speaking very loudly – good for callers hearing mr, disconcerting for myself and people around me.
• callers hear a lot of ambient noise when I’m out on the street. (but I am in new york)

Bottom line: excellent headphones with a few quirks, which shine where it matters. And a great gift. Thanks Elina!

(Posted from my phone while walking through Central Park, listening to music, taking calls, and shooting some snapshots.)

Crazy.

Your headline is misleading – I hope it’s an innocent mistake, as opposed to an intentional attempt to spread FUD about Open Source software. The crucial nuance that’s missing, both from the headline and the article, is that bugs such as this are just as likely to occur in closed-source software as in open-source — but with open-source software, they’re far more likely to be discovered, sooner, precisely because the code is available for anyone to peruse!

I expect more from Technology Review. Please consider adding a note or correction to this effect.

I’m not actually surprised or anything; TR has always had a corporate feel to it – it’s generally about MITers or ex-MITers making money, as opposed to pure excitement about technology.

Edit: Struck out the last paragraph; after Jason Pontin’s comment below, I realized that my impressions of TR are almost certainly out of date. BTW, he also responded to my comment; check out the discussion there.