Dreaming Of Beetles

I love Terminal.app. Especially with tabs. I spend most my day in it. I don’t want to make you read my ramblings, but the thing that almost drives me to jump out the window is consistently losing connections due to timeouts. I’m usually on three or four servers at a time and when I’m at home, every few minutes, timeout. BLAST! This doesn’t happen at all locations, usually on residential connections. I’ve dealt with it for years. Why?

Smack my head. I should have jumped out that window. This is so easy to fix:

1. Open up your sshd config, usually in /etc/ssh/sshd_config
2. Uncomment “ClientAliveInterval” and add the number of seconds after. I went with 600.

Problem solved. Kind of makes me question how much misery I just accept because “That’s just the way it is”.

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Gort!

Update: It seems that I’ve over-optimized a bit on the latest build. I’ve toned it down and made it Tiger-compatible. The new build is on the downloads page.

With a few new browsers released this past week, I thought I’d redo the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark on a couple (sorry Opera), and report the results. As usual, I disabled all add-ons, extensions, InputManagers, etc. The benchmarks were run on the same machine as the previous tests.

I also created another Intel Optimized Build of Firefox 3.5 RC preview (Shiretoko) using an updated .mozconfig file based on several reader contributions (including Mozilla employees). This new config is heavily optimized (that’s your warning). You can download both of those files on the downloads page.

Safari and Shiretoko did better than their previous incarnations, while Chrome OS X suffered in it’s jump from Chromium. The breakdown looks something like this:

• Safari: 20.9% faster
• Shiretoko: 13.6% faster
• Chrome: 16.7% slower

And the neat graph looks like this:

SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark Results

Oh, and to find out what Gort is all about, go to about:robots in Firefox.

Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!

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Update 2: And people thought I was nuts when I said the compass is important. Apple also seems to have not realized as they are just now working on more video hooks in the current 3.1 betas. Also, check out this video from AcrossAir. Mind blowing…

Update: Here is a much more in-depth posting on the importance of the compass:

The New iPhone Is a Pointing Device For The Real World: The Ground Will Speak.

One of the sleeper hits of the WWDC was the announcement of a magnetometer in the iPhone 3GS. I’m not sure this is getting the attention it deserves as I believe it is truly groundbreaking and will open an entirely new paradigm in mobile computing.

Well, I guess one guy understood the importance (from Gizmodo):

There’s also a built-in digital compass. One guy goes crazy. “A cool compass fan out there,” says Phil.

So what’s so special about a compass? Two hints:

1. Sky Map for Android (I guess they changed the name from Star Map after Searchology)
2. Wikitude AR Travel Guide (Top-50 finalist in Google’s Android Developer Challenge)

What I’m getting at is Augmented Reality. This has been a dream of mine for the past 10 years or so, first envisioning the idea as a set of glasses you could wear to annotate and read info on various locations. Later I dreamt of wackier and wackier ideas, but always knew I would never be able to pull it off – the technologies weren’t ready or weren’t cheap enough to go mainstream. Until now.

I’m not going to say much more on this issue… something’s brewing in the lab!

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A couple posts wrapped into one:

Gmail IMAP Slow on Mail.app
With over 110,000 messages in my gmail account, Mail.app started choking bad. The problem got out of hand two days ago so I did something about it. This isn’t for the weak of heart. First quit Mail.app, then fire up terminal:

# cd ~/Library/Mail/IMAP-xxx@xxx.com@imap.gmail.com/\[Gmail\]/
# rm -rf All\ Mail.imapmbox
# ln -s /dev/null All\ Mail.imapmbox
# rm ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index

DO NOT DO THIS WITH A POP ACCOUNT. Also, I advise you to back up these directories rather than deleting them, but I like to throw caution to the wind. Fire up Mail.app and it will reindex you mailboxes and you’re off the races. The dreaded “All Mail” directory will still be in your list of mailboxes, but don’t worry, you’ve neutered it.

Update: Check out this excellent article about achieving Mail.app nirvana.

Chromium Builds For OS X
I’ve been providing builds of Chromium for OS X on my downloads page for a while. Recently, Google has opened up their BuildBot Snapshots to the public. At first I was a tad skeptical of this as I was a BuildBot Waterfall freak, waiting for the perfect level of green before grabbing a revision to build. I’ve been watching the Snapshots and can say with a bit of confidence now that they are legit builds and are only pushed if the OS X code base has been touched (If I’m wrong on this, please correct me). With that said, I’m no longer going to provide custom builds of Chromium.

Apple’s m-Commerce Strategy
A very interesting app hit the app store this morning (or last night) that made me scratch my head a bit. It’s the Burger King Now app that allows you to pre-pay for purchases. Pre-Pay? That made me think of TechCrunch’s m-Commerce article on Jack Dorsey’s new stealth startup code-named Squirrel. And there is this quote:

Squirrel is both a physical device add-on to the iPhone as well as an iPhone app. Ingeniously, the device derives enough power from the physical swiping of the credit card to then read the card, so it requires no external power from the iPhone or anywhere else. The physical device apparently looks something like an acorn, thus the code name Squirrel.

Swiping Cards? WTF? iPhone OS 3 will enable in-app payments that connects directly to your iTunes account and your credit card. Why is a physical device needed? Well the answer to that is to bypass the 30% Apple tax.

Apple could potentially enter this space, but would probably raise some flags at the DOJ. I think Jack is on the right track here and the potential of such a business boggles the mind.

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Instead of updating each post with new download versions, I’ve consolidated all builds onto one page – Downloads. I have also added the mozconfig file I’m using to build the Intel Optimized Shiretoko as many have requested. I would really like to get feedback on it so that future builds get faster.

I’m not quite ready for nightlies (but getting there). I’ll also be adding some iPhone apps with provisioning shortly. I’m not going to deal with the app store just yet.

I also have some WordPress plugins that I want to release. So those will be available shortly as well.

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Reality

This is what I hope the future holds.

image: pyxelated

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I’ve added a new “Reading List” section to the main navigation. These are books I’m currently reading and books I’ve recently finished. I’ve limited this to technical books so you won’t see the fact that I’m currently reading The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder.

Lately I’ve been more into reading articles and that is where you will see the most action – I read several thousand blog/magazine articles a year and I’ve documented most of them. The political, non-PC, cracked, etc. aren’t listed for obvious reasons.

Also, I spend a ton of time watching lectures and documentaries. Most recently, I just finished watching the 200 or so talks on ted.com. There are a ton of mind blowing speakers in this collection and wish to some day attend. If I were to recommend a single video at the moment it would be Larry Brilliant’s TED Prize video. Simply brilliant (pun intended).

Now I’m on to the Watergate Scandal for some reason. My mind wanders and I just follow it.

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I’m making another go at this blogging thing. I’ll be experimenting with the site, widgets, etc. so things may break here and there. I’ve bolted on a framework to create dynamic content as you can see on my Recently Read Articles page.

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