Pete Ware

Here’s how much various tech companies spend on advertising. I’ve always thought the quality of a product is an inverse of how much is spent advertising it — if it was great you hardly need to spend much to get someone to buy it.

So, it’s clear Google and Amazon are doing well. Yahoo is slated to increase to $80 million. It’s the “Ad Spending As a Percent of Revenue” that is important. This is from Business Insider:

I just read that Facebook chat is now based on Jabber/XMPP. What does this mean? Basically, any of the instant messaging clients that can talk to sites such as Google Talk such as iChat, Adium, or pidgin can be used to connect to Facebook.

First, you need to make sure you have an account setup on Facebook — not just able to login to Facebook but an actual, short name. Go to “Account” menu:

And then you can set your “Username”:

Then you can setup your IM client to connect using the “Jabber” (or XMPP) protocol with your Jabber ID as the above username@chat.facebook.com. This example is for Adium but other clients are similar:

You probably don’t need to change the port to 5222 but you may need to make sure SSL/TLS is disabled.

After that, it should connect to Facebook. You don’t have to have Facebook open in a browser.

I grabbed a simple, free pixel editor for Mac OS X called Paintbrush.  It seems adequate for my simple needs which are usually just adding  a note to a screen grab.

You can make it the default for opening an image by an existing image with Command-I and changing the “Open with” to the application and clicking the “Change All…” button:

A few months ago I was complaining about not being able to synch my iPhone with Snow Leopard Server. Today, I realized that email push wasn’t working either!

This ARS Technica article iPhone and Snow Leopard Server’s failure to communicate provides more detail.

Imagine if the iPod worked with a Windows machine but not on a Mac. Would make zero sense, right? Amazingly, this scenario describes the current reality with the iPhone and Apple’s server edition of its Mac OS X operating system. Mac OS X Server has some great features, such as podcast production and collaborative wikis. But from the perspective of iPhone compatibility, it’s one of the worst server OSes available.

This ZDNet Snow Leopard Server review mentions the same problem:

For example, Apple told us that the new Mail 2 server software supports push notification to iPhones. But we couldn’t get this working in our lab tests. This Apple document describes push email support on the iPhone but does not include Mail 2 push configuration.

A cool mockup/rumour guide about the alledged Apple Tablet:

I have some contacts I wanted to share with other people so I figured let’s put them into Address Book Server on my Snow Leopard Server. I moved the group on to the server and everything was great. Contacts show up in Address Book on my macbook.

I synch my iPhone as usual. Next day I get a call from a familiar number but no name (I can’t remember phone numbers if my life dependent on it)! I check the contacts on my iPhone and none of the ones I moved are there!

After much fiddling and googling it turns out it doesn’t work! That doesn’t make any sense. How could Apple fail at something so basic? I imagine they want the iPhone to sync remotely to Address Book Server much like iCal and mail. Reasonable philosophy but it doesn’t do that! In the interim, I’d expect iTunes to be able to sync — after all, it’s in your address book. Not only that, they already handle Google sync using CardDAV, right? So why isn’t it in iTunes until they get it working on the iPhone!

From ForkBombr:

> Sadly, this isn’t the case. Address Book Server works beautifully between Macs. It’s fast and reliable. However, the iPhone OS doesn’t support CardDAV, the technology behind Address Book Server, meaning these contacts cannot be synced over the air to an iPhone like iCal or Mail data.

And the relevant discussion:

> ABS does not sync OTA or have push changes. The iPhone supports LDAP access. This means you can lookup contct info stored in your WGM for users in your company. It does not support CardDAV.

ABS is Address Book Sync; OTA is over-the-air; WGM is Work Group Manager (aka Apple’s LDAP server); CardDAV is how to share contact information.

I downloaded GrandPerspective to visualize disk usage on my laptop. It uses the tree visualization algorithm to show the directory hierarchy and the size of the hierarchy.

Each “bump” represents a file with the area reflecting the relatives size. As you move around, a series of nested rectangles are highlighted. Each highlighted rectangle represents a directory and the nesting of the rectangles the directory hierarchy.

To reset Xcode to the default settings:

$ defaults delete com.apple.Xcode
$ rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/Xcode

First, I dislike having a lot of popup windows so I set the layout to “All-In-One” to keep most things within a single window:

And my usual indentation style:

I like having the files autosaved on build:

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