Texting Solution?

Can you believe?

Theater chain will reward moviegoers for not texting during film - http://pulse.me/s/fnmPk

Apple to think about

After Steve Jobs, Does Apple Still Innovate Like It Used To? : The New Yorker - http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/10/apple-after-steve-jobs.html

How low can you go?

With a little fear, skydiver ready to leap into record books - http://pulse.me/s/dZCwC

Apple says sorry

They were forced to apologise due to a huge number of complaints. I can't help but wonder if we would have had the same apology if he was still around.

I remember the fallout from the 'Grip of Death' saga and the users were told that they were holding the phones wrong and were then belatedly offered free covers.

Would we have seen something similar if Jobs was in charge?

Apple says sorry for iPhone maps app - IOL SciTech | IOL.co.za

Debugging...

You do not need a can of Doom anymore in order to debug your pc, but once upon a time they did.

The term was popularised by Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper when she was working as a computer technician on the Harvard Mark II electromechanical computer in 1947. It was built for the US Navy to do something with, Wikipedia just say calculations and test programs.

The computer was so advanced that it could do calculations in 0.125 seconds. This gave it a speed of 8 Hz, the machine I am typing this on is rated for 2.5 GHz, which makes it 3125 million times faster, provided my maths is correct. But even today sometimes you still get problems that require you to open the box up and remove stuff and put it back, and replace and test, until it works again.

This is still called debugging, and we get to do it on hardware as well as software. You have to test and play and try different options to see what happens. There is no time frame if you don't know what the problem is, once you have identified that, you can start testing the solution.

We are lucky though that modern computers are a lot more robust and the software is no longer dependent upon magnetic tapes and vacuum tubes, so cracking it open is not that common anymore. But we still use the same term.

At the time in 1947 they saw something was wrong and started tracing the fault, to discover a moth stuck in a relay switch, which prevented it from functioning correctly.

Grace Hopper quipped that they are 'de-bugging the system', and the rest is history. They then taped the now dead moth into their logbook, probably on a whim.

To view the actual page from their logbook with the remains of the moth (which is on display in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History), click here.

I reckon even back then, the IT people were a bit strange, with different ideas, from there the odd terms that we have carried over from our grandparents in the industry.

Apple vs Apple

With the current court cases going on between Apple Inc. and Samsung regarding the Galaxy Tab and related products, I thought I would highlight a different Apple vs Apple battle.

It started in January 1968 when The Beatles (!) were looking for ways to pay lower tax and also support other artists. They came up with Apple Corps, which is a pun on apple core.

Anecdotally, Steve Jobs and The Woz had to file legal papers after their first computer started selling really well and they decided to form a company, but did not have a name yet, so chose the first word from the dictionary. Which is not apple and Jobs also claims differently.

Either way, it caused four lawsuits between the Beatles and Apple Computer between 1978 and 2006 regarding trademark infringement and who had the right to produce and sell music; as well as causing the BBC to interview the wrong Guy on live television. (Seriously, the BBC made that mistake in May 2006, read the transcript - it is hilarious).

The Beatles were responsible for stopping development of the Apple II in the late eighties, probably the first time that musicians influenced the growing tech industry, just because Apple Computer built MIDI and audio recording technology into it.

Apple Computer hit back in 1991 with a system sound called Chimes in the Macintosh operating system (the sound was later renamed to sosumi,  read phonetically as “so sue me".

It all eventually ended in 2006, but the Beatles music was not available on iTunes until September 2010.

All over a fruit.

Mathematics and Wet Dogs

So this is what happens when you apply maths to wet dogs...

The Science of Dog-Shaking - http://pulse.me/s/chBU4

Easter Eggs

Not the chocolate kind, the kind that programmers slip in to mess with you.

Since the earliest days of video games and software, the game designers and programmers have slipped hidden messages and images into the games, must like Alfred Hitchcock and Steven King do when they make cameo appearances in their films without being included on the cast list. At other times they spent a lot more time playing with the code or even putting whole games in.

In Office '97 there was a whole flight simulator game hidden in Excel and Word contained a pinball game. if you want to win Solitaire in Windows XP, just press press Alt+⇧ Shift+2 at the same time.

Asking Google Maps for walking directions from The Shire to Mordor produces "One does not simply walk into Mordor.", a warning that replicates a line from The Lord of the Rings.

Google search has also had a few others, such as typing in 'do a barrel roll' made the whole screen rotate 360 degrees. 'Make it snow' produced virtual snowflakes on the screen.

The people responsible sometimes just wanted to give the users something to do or discover by accident as most of these were not documented but discovered by accident. At other times they wanted to ensure that they are acknowledged as having played a part in the game development, or made political or social statements. Some programmers wrote their names in graffiti on the background, or gave complete new characters for you to play with.

Unfortunately the easter eggs nowadays are  security risk as the big players in the industry cannot have rogue code floating around in their programs anymore. But as long as there are programmers with an agenda, even if it is just to make you laugh, we may still discover new and exciting hidden treasures.

That Pesky Login

Password Fatigue is a real thing. It happens when you have too many passwords to remember for Facebook, Twitter, your PC at home, the one at work, your internet banking, the ATM pin code, your fancy new access system at work and the password to allow you access to your car's entertainment system.

IT people get frustrated when they have to reset passwords every second day, and the management decision to make the password as difficult as possible to guess, also means that it is difficult to remember. It is ok to sometimes forget it and require a reset, but can we ask you at least try before phoning?

There is a difference between a login and a password, the former is the combination of username and password, the latter is just that.

When you phone to say you have have forgotten your password and we ask what your username is, an answer like 'I don't know' is problematic at best and at worst we want to crawl in under the desk and recite the opening sequence of Star Wars.

It usually is your name, surname or combination thereof. If another person used your PC it will remember and display that on screen. If you blithely type in your password without checking which username you are using, we will get the call.

If you use your Windows login that you use to get into your PC to try logging into your accounting system, we will get the call.

If you try to log onto the remote server at work, when working from home, with your home PC login, we will get the call.

It is usually after half an hour or more of back and forth and countless rolled eyes and whispered asides to your spouse or our colleagues that we ask the question: With what username are you logging on?

Imagine a login is like a key, you use a different one for every room; from your kitchen, garage, your office, to your car. The same key will not open all of them.

You can maybe use the same password, but sometimes your username is different, remember this.

Strangely, few people forget the internet banking login.

IT People Have Families Too

Contrary to popular belief, IT People are not spawned out of the mess of cables in the corner of the server room, nor do they crawl out of the electronics recycling bin as the offspring of 1980's clunky PC towers and those green monochrome screens.

As odd as it may sound, they have families too; parents, siblings and sometimes a wife and kids.

And just like any other (mostly) normal families, they enjoy spending time together, not just on special days like Christmas, Valentine's or birthdays.

They enjoy their weekends and sometimes go out in the evenings for dinner or a movie, albeit probably science fiction.

Their hobbies might be odd, like collecting Hello Kitty merchandise, or making scale models of early servers, even sometimes as mundane as bird watching. But they need the time and space in order to participate in their chosen mode of relaxation.

If they do not get their time apart and the chance to sort out their garage and mow the lawn, do not be surprised if they arrive with trenchcoats or dressed as ninjas the next time you call them for help.

It is up to you to consider how urgent or important the problem is that you are having, if it can wait until tomorrow, let it go. Allow the IT Guy to take his girlfriend out to see the latest X-Men movie, or the space to fulfill his goal of watching all the Quentin Tarantino movies back to back.

It is up to you to preserve his sanity, especially so when you consider the amount of times he has answered the same question in the past week.

So let him go, they are not cyborgs yet that can work 24 hours a day, they need their sleep.

Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol

Nerds do have a sense of humour, just not what you expect.

It is sometimes a bit childish, but more often than not a lot more cerebral.

The Internet uses the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, that is what the 'http' means in front of the website addresses. This is a standard that is specified and controlled by the World Wide Web Consortium, that oversees the Internet.

There are other standards as well, that define everything that you see or don't see when opening your browser and hitting 'search'.

But the one that it the most important started off as a joke, but is still official. Go see what Wikipedia says if you don't believe me.

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

Of course, I don't expect everyone to understand.

The era of the tablet has arrived

Smartphones and tablets are taking over, adding features to a single device will always be a compromise but to most of the casual users this does not really matter.
NPD: US holiday electronics sales drop 5.9 percent - http://pulse.me/s/4NI9B