OS X Kernel Panic

So, the grass is always greener. My new MacBook Pro has been having problems resuming from sleep on occasion. It is somehow less annoying then the Windows “Blue Screen of Death”, maybe because Apple is a little more stylish with their error message?

I made my first call into Apple’s technical supoprt Monday afternoon. One of the nice things about the way Apple handles their technical support calls is they give you an option to schedule a call back in lieu of waiting on the phone. Since this wasn’t a critical issue I opted for the call back on Tuesday morning at 9:15. This Tuesday, my phone rang promptly at 9:15AM, it was Apple. I was advised that a technical support represenative was waiting to assit me. After I pressed a button on my phone I was connected. The experience was pretty positive overall, while this is one of those issues that’s difficult to troubleshoot the tech made a valliant effort, although a little misguided in my opinion.

I attempted to re-create the issue I was expeirencing without success, and after the call I tried a few more times. I thought, maybe it was fixed. However Wednesday afternoon (yesterday) I received the same error. Last Night, while working on a report, I was greeted with the Update icon jumping in my dock letting me know there were updates available. Sure enough, new Apple EFI updates for reliability and sleep issues. Awwww yeah. Applied it last night, and let her go into sleep mode. This morning, resumed with out a hitch, maybe that was the fix? We’ll see… In any event, here are the deatils from MacWorld on the release of the patches.

Apple on Wednesday released updates for its newest line of notebooks. Separate downloads are available for the MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air computers.

The MacBook Pro 15-inch SMC Firmware Update 1.2, MacBook SMC Firmware Update 1.2, and MacBook Air SMC Firmware Update 1.1 all address the same issues. The update improves the sensing and accuracy of the MagSafe Power Adapter indicator light, and the battery charge indicator lights.

MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.6, MacBook Air EFI Firmware Update 1.1, and MacBook EFI Firmware Update 1.3 all fix several issues to improve the stability of the MacBooks.

The proper update for your machine will automatically show up in the software update mechanism when it’s run. You can also visit Apple’s download section and choose your update.

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Apple In-Ear Headphones

I’ve always found the stock iPod/iPhone ear buds to be amazingly uncomfortable, they’ve always sounded great but I could never stand to wear them. The diamater seemed a bit on the large size and I had to shoehorn them into my ear canal. Like much of Apple’s design, despite complaints they continuted to manufacture them that way for years (much like the “we don’t need to mouse buttons” argument). It’s refreshing to see them correct some of these flaws.

I already invested in a Shure headset for the iPhone (really awesome set and good quality) so I probably won’t get to try the new Apple headset out, however I’ll update if I find any reviews out there.

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OS Market Share

Computer World has an article that illustrates the shift of clients moving away from the Microsoft Windows platform while Apple’s OS X has gained a considerable amount at %0.66 (8% total market share). And, ccoincidentally, I should be running OS X full-time before the end of today. Woohoo!

OS market share data is available at hitlink’s site.

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Beer Brewing Bender

Simon Jansen from New Zeland is my hero. Not just for ASCII Star Wars or his Jet Powered Beer Cooler but mostly for his Beer Brewing Bender. I’ve always been a long time Futurama fan and Bender is far and away my favorite character. Here Simon has created a beer brewing Bender (much like the Microbrewing Bender from The Route of All Evil) with all the details. As he mentions, Bender’s CPU is reported to be a 6502 processor (Apple I, Apple II, Commodore PET, Commodore VIC 20) so he takes that to heart and actually builds an audio controller using a 6502 processor (+10 geek points).

Aside from all of the geek technical details, he does an excellent job with the overall fit and finish. He’s really inspired me to build my own Bender (something else to put on my “Someday Maybe” list). Although, I’m not into brewing beer I’ll have to figure out somehting else it can do, any suggestions?

You should really check out Simon’s project, truly a masterpiece. Hopefully I’ll have one in my office someday, God knows the wife would never allow something like this past the garage. The wife said she’d love to have this in the house, I know she’s the coolest wife ever but this pretty much confirms it! Love you honey!

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From GeekBrief.tv:

The release of the iPhone last year was one of the most fun days of my life. We waited in line for ten hours and bonded with the people waiting with us. We’re not expecting the same magic this year, but we still want to make it an unforgettable day.

Friday, July 11, 2008 People are flying and driving in to buy their phones with us at Northpark in Dallas, and then we’ll all have lunch at Buca di Beppo (Park Lane).

The music video is from the launch of the iPhone and the song is Hello, Hello by Geoff Smith. You can buy his latest album, Ones and 0′s, at RingtoneFeeder.com. You can also follow him on Twitter at Twitter.com/GeoffSmith.

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Members of China’s armed police demonstrate a rapid deployment during an anti-terrorist drill held in Jinan, capital of east China’s Shandong Province July 2, 2008, roughly one month ahead of the Beijing Olympics.

Uhhh, okay… I guess that’s one way to do it, as long as there are no obstacles in your path, or your Segway doesn’t decide to reverse it’s course out of the blue.

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I want.

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via All things Distributed

A few weeks ago computer science icon Jim Gray mysteriously disappeared after a solo trip to the Farallon Islands near San Francisco to scatter his mother’s ashes. The coast guard, unable to locate anything (not even debris), called off the search last week. Additionally last week 3 private planes searched through the coastal areas and they also returned unsuccessful.

Through a major effort by many people we were able to have the Digital Globe satellite make a run over the area on Thursday morning and have the data made available publicly. We have split these images into smaller tiles that can be easily scanned visually and stored into the Amazon S3 storage service. We then created tasks for reviewing these images and loaded then into the Amazon Mechanical Turk Service.

This is where you come in. We need your help in reviewing these images to see whether you can locate Jim’s boat in any of these images. Please go to the Amazon Mechanical Turk site and help us find Jim Gray.

The weather conditions were not ideal as some areas were cloudy, but we can still look for him in those places where there is a somewhat clear view. We hope to get more satellite data in the coming days of a wider area. The current images are panchromatic with a 0.82m, and Jim boat would be about 6 pixels in size. Please visit the Amazon Mechanical Turk site for more details.

I have to stress that many individuals and companies are to thank for making this possible; many academics friends relentlessly worked around the clock to get access to the data, many industry friends of Jim functioned as connectors to hook up officials and individuals, and people from NASA, Digital Globe, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Amazon and others worked hard get to the data collected and available on a very short time scale. The Mechanical Turk team worked deep into the night to make this work.

Now it is your turn, go find Jim Gray.

Update 2/3: We have now added the data from yesterdays NASA ER-2 flight to system. They are in the same Mechanical Turk Group as the satellite images search. Please follow this link to work on these. More details here

Update 2/4: Over 100,000 assigments have been completed, and new high resolution images are coming online. More details here.

Even though it didn’t seem to pan out, it was a great use of technology and distributed processing, even if it was using humans mostly for the processing part. There were some reports on Monday about body that was found near Point Diablo but it turned out not to be Jim. I’m also curious if Jim had any safety equipment onboard, such as a Category I EPIRB which would deploy automatically in the event of a sinking, sent out a distress beacon and identify his vessel.

Jim Gray’s Wikipedia entry

Jim Gray’s Microsoft page

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“TJX Cos. said today that the unauthorized intrusion into its computer system occurred nearly a year earlier than it previously believed.

The Framingham operator of such offprice retail chains as T.J. Maxx and Marshalls offered additional details about a data breach it first disclosed last month.

TJX said today in a statement: “While the company previously believed that the intrusion took place only from May 2006 to January 2007, TJX now believes its computer systems was also intruded upon in July 2005 and on various subsequent dates in 2005. TJX continues to believe there was no compromise of customer data after-mid December 2006.”

This is the very reason you have to check your credit card billing statements very carefully every month. A lot of times this information gets sold in bulk, and to confirm the validity of the “product” the purchaser will run through some small charges first. Noticing these small charges could be the difference in your bank account being drained (if you use a check card) or not. Thankfully most banks have stepped up and will work with the customer to replace the funds, or not stack on overdraft fees and the like.

Personally my check card number has been used at least 3 times, my business credit card a few times as well. Some of those thefts I believe were actually from a person in a restaurant or gas station copying my information down; unfortunately I never heard the disposition of any of those issues since it’s usually the card processor that does the investigation.

It just goes to show you, information security is here to stay. Companies need to realize that security is no longer a “nice to have” and is a “must have”.

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