In the last couple of days my iPhone made a couple of ghost calls. I.e. it called some people from my address book, without me doing the actual calls. I think I found the reason for that now. When you hit the home button for several seconds, an iPhone 3GS with iOS 3.x or 4.x will go into voice command mode. This even works when the phone is keylocked. The voice function is not so robust and will misinterpret quite a few background sounds, noises and voices for commands. I couldn’t yet make 100% sure that this is how it happened, but it seems to be the only possibility so far, since my phone is always keylocked, when I carry it in my pocket. So I figure the home button was accidentally pressed, and thus the voice command was activated. Will try to investigate this further…
Wishlist item for the iPhone: Clickable Maps Icons
What annoys me most in the maps application of the iPhone: You cannot tap or click on symbols. E.g. when you tap a bus-icon in the maps.google.com website, you will get a popup with the name of the bus stop and the lines that go there. This is not possible on the iPhone. I also use the fantastic Fahrplan application, however if you do not know the name of the bus stop you want to go to, you’re out of luck.
OS X graphics driver bugs
On both our MBP as well as our iMac I can get OS X to crash when using a perfectly fine fragment shader, which works well under Linux. Both under Linux as well as under OS X I am using NVIDIA hardware. This is what the crash looks like:
OS X crashing when using complex GLSL shaders from Arne Schmitz on Vimeo.
Update 2010-07-13: Apple already wrote back, and requested a sample app, which I provided. Let’s see if they can figure this out. Kudos for reacting so quickly!
me.com woes
I have been using me.com for a while now, and am relatively happy with it. The automatic sync of the data between my work laptop and my iPhone is absolutely priceless. Now I’ve upgraded to the family account to share the (for my needs) ample 40 GB with two friends. Turns out, the other two accounts can only get 5 GB of storage. Ouch. That sort of sucks. Right now, 10 GB cannot be used at all, cause they are reserved for two more people. Why am I then paying for the extra storage anyhow?
VLC 1.1.0: Broken deinterlace on OS X
Well, I was wondering why some DVDs looked jaggy on OS X when watched with VLC 1.1.0. It seems deinterlacing on VLC for OS X is currently broken. The bug is fixed now, but we probably have to wait some more time for a 1.1.1 release.
New Book: Modeling and Tools for Network Simulation
There is a new book out, for which I contributed part of a chapter: Modeling and Tools for Network Simulation. The book is meant to be a textbook for everyone who needs to simulate computer networks. From the physical layer to the application layer, some best practices are described. Contrary to Amazon and Springer’s webpages, the book has more than 256 pages. It’s got more than 500 pages, so it is rather comprehensive.
Shortcuts on OS X
I use Spark for defining global shortcuts to tools, applications etc. One of the best things is shortcutting to the login window. This way you can quickly lock your screen, which is not bindable by default in OS X. Also useful: shortcuts to AppleScript, e.g. for opening a new Safari window. This is what Spark looks like, when you edit the shortcuts:
Yellow pages when printing with Debian?
We had the problem of yellow tinted printouts on our Debian Testing machines. With my OS X machine, I did not have this problem, although both system use CUPS 1.4.3 for printing. It seems that Ghostscript was the culprit. The pstopdf filter to be exact. This bug report in the Debian bug tracker describes the exact same problem. The idea is to comment out the “-dUseCIEColor” option. I am not sure in how far this will also change the colour reproduction, but since our systems are not colour calibrated anyhow, I think this will not matter.
Cococa Emacs
I just found out that there is a new website with Cocoa based Emacs builds. Now I can switch from the out-of-date MacPorts version to the Emacs 23.2 of Emacs for Mac OS X.
Update: This is really nice, now also the GUD debugger frontend works nicely. Check it out:
Typo3: Filelinks are not actually links
Whoever named the Typo3 filelinks, should be fired. Out of a cannon. Into the sun. This is because the filelink, does not actually link to a file, but it copies it to some folder (upload/media by default). Why this is so, is beyond my understanding. When you add a simple link in the RTE, and link to a file, you get the expected result: You get an <a> tag linking to the corresponding file in the fileadmin/ folder of Typo3. But when using the filelink, the file will be copied to the upload/media/ directory.
I have tried to use the DAM extension (digital asset management), but that is such a convoluted, under-documented beast, that I got rid of it very quickly. Now I still do not have a solution, but I welcome every hint on how to solve this.