PixelFlop - Random Thoughts

iPhone now has MMS, but not really

2009-09-28T09:22:00.004-05:00

The big day has come and gone. September 25th marked the launch of MMS on the iPhone, and guess what? It doesn't work.

Here we are 3 days past the launch date, and many AT&T customers still can't send or receive an MMS message. All we see is the dreaded red ! fail badge.

Yet again we find that the weakest link in the iPhone experience has nothing to do with the Hardware, the Software or Apple itself. It's the network.

Get your act together, AT&T.

Authorize.net is down!

2009-07-03T08:56:00.004-05:00

Bad news for a TON of online retailers out there -- payment gateway service Authorize.net is DOWN. No transactions are being processed, and their own web site will not even load.

Worse yet, any site displaying their badge will load incredibly slow.

Hundreds of thousands of web site must be affected by this, yet it has received ZERO coverage by the mainstream press.

Spread the word!

Updated: 10:45am EST - Conflicting reports on Twitter and Digg regarding what is happening.

Some are saying that a power outage at a Data Center in Seattle is the cause of the problems.
Others are saying it's an Earthquake in Utah that has cause a fire in a Data Center.
Finally, there's word of a flood at a Data Center in Dallas.

By all accounts the outage is closing in on 8 hours now. Bad news for many retailers...

1812 Overture

2009-04-15T18:58:00.003-05:00

It occurs to me today that anyone who doesn't appreciate the brilliance of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture clearly doesn't know a damned thing about music.

In an age saturated by the drivel of Brittany Spears and Fergie, the mere presence of a violin makes any ditty seem sophisticated. Yet the Ouverture Solennelle, L'Année 1812, Op. 49 remains one of the most inspiring and emotion-evoking pieces of music ever written.

Granted, any composition that includes field artillery would get a high rating in my book, regardless of the melody. That said, I'm hard pressed to think of any other scrap of music that makes the excitement level rise, and gets the heart pumping as much as the last few minutes of the 1812. I never cease to be amazed by it's complex texture of themes, and the steady rise of anticipation as we move from the tranquility of the string that begin the piece to the cannon fire that punctuates the finale.

Mr. Tchaikovsky, I salute you. Well done indeed!

Apple Should Buy Valve

2009-03-07T23:42:00.003-05:00

Apple should buy Valve, the makers of Half Life, Portal and Team Fortress 2.

I can already hear a lot of you saying "You're crazy! Valve doesn't even make software for the Mac. Why should Apple waste money on that?"

The answer is simple: Steam

Think of it this way: What are the major entertainment sources for Americans? Movies, Television, Music, Sports and ..... Games.

Apple already dominates Movies, Television and Music sales through iTunes. Dominates. Games are the next frontier.

Steam is the iTunes of Games. A simple way to buy games online, instantly. Imagine if Apple could incorporate this into iTunes. They would be the entertainment company. A market leader in four of the five major diversions for the US (let's forget about sports -- for now).

Apple has the influence to push game publishers to release their games on iSteam. From Half Life to Diablo III, Call of Duty and Left 4 Dead -- all available for download on your PC or Mac at a moment's notice. And Apple get a cut of every sale. It's a gold mine.

This alone would be reason enough to buy Valve. But it gets better. As the owner of Valve, Apple could also push them to release their games for the Mac as well. Apple has long claimed that they were serious about gaming on the Mac, but reality has shown otherwise. This could change everything.

Imagine Team Fortress 3 being released on the Mac a month before the Windows version? Imagine a Mac version of Half Life 3 released day and date with the Windows version? Imagine Portal 2 on the 50" plasma in your local Apple store?

Yes, it may sound crazy at first, but the more I think about it, the more it makes a ton of sense.

Where is Snow Leopard?

2009-01-12T09:16:00.002-05:00

Is anyone else surprised that there was no mention of Snow Leopard (aka Mac OSX 10.6) at MWSF 2009? Isn't MacWorld the logical place to at least give us a sense of when we can expect to see it this year?

The lack of comment on it in the keynote seems foreboding to me...

The Cookie Monster Slayer

2008-10-09T12:51:00.004-05:00

My favorite photo this month...

President Clinton on David Letterman

2008-09-23T13:07:00.001-05:00

Did anyone else see President Clinton on Letterman last night (9/22/2008)? I recorded it and just watched it during lunch.

Brilliant.

I thought the interview was excellent, and it reinforces my believe that Letterman is a much more shrewd host than he gets credit for (or makes out to be).

Americans are getting nervous. The economy is in shambles. We're hearing alarms about "peak oil", and energy crisis. There are record home foreclosures. Natural disasters in the South. We're mired in Vietnam Part 2 in Iraq. Things look bleak.

Rather than another night of zany stupid pet tricks, Letterman instead books President Bill Clinton and asks him about what has happened, and what can be done to fix it. No off-the-wall antics or sill questions (well, maybe one), just a quiet studio and three full segments for Clinton to answer the few, pointed questions Dave asks. I thought it was a brilliant move. Clinton is knowledgeable, relevant, engaging, and in some ways, polarizing. A perfect guest for a meaty subject in a venue that usually trends toward the absurd.

Great stuff. If you didn't see it, you may be able to watch it at Letterman's Web Site. I don't know if the entire interview is there, but I would hope so.

Leopard and SBS 2003 Still Don't Play Nice

2008-09-18T10:44:00.002-05:00

For the most part, my life after the "switch" to the Macintosh has been great. No more antivirus software. No more fear of viewing an HTML email. No more long boot-ups and sluggish performance.

One constant point of misery remains, however...

As a .NET developer, I must continue to use a Microsoft SBS 2003 server to get my job done. Alas, the Mac and the Windows Server don't like each other. Shocking, I know.

The simple act of copying a file from my Mac to a shared folder on the Windows Server is like playing Russian Roulette. Sometimes it works. Sometimes the file never copies, we end up with a zero byte file in the folder, then the server crashes. Kaboom!

This has been going on for 9 months now. I have all the latest patches from Apple and Microsoft. I've followed all the online guides. I have scoured the web for any tip, trick or kludge to work around it -- no luck. Grrrrr.

It's an Apple problem, because real Windows PCs can work on the file share for weeks on end and NEVER have this problem.
It's a Microsoft problem, because regardless of what the Mac does it should NEVER crash the server.
It's my problem, because I'm stuck in the middle, rebooting and trying again and again like a deranged circus monkey.

Hope springs eternal. Microsoft has recently release Windows SBS 2008, and Apple will release Snow Leopard this winter. Maybe then I can truly achieve OS harmony. Until then....

...can anyone help?

PS: Windows Guy: Please spare the "Get rid of the Mac" comments. Mac Guy: Please spare the "Get rid of Windows" comments. Linux Guy: No one cares. Thanks!

Sam & Max are coming to the Wii

2008-07-02T12:53:00.003-05:00

The big news yesterday was that we finally made the jump to HD in the PixelFlop household. A new Pioneer 50" Plasma TV was delivered in the early afternoon, and the wife came home from Target with a Nintendo Wii shortly after. It was like Christmas in July.

Today, that Christmas just got even better.

IGN just released news that Sam & Max, Freelance Detectives are coming to the Wii.

What a fantastic idea. Point and Click adventures like Sam & Max, Curse of Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle are amongst my favorite types of games. They've fallen out of favor in the high paced, shoot shoot shoot world of console gaming that dominates this decade, but for my money, they top the list when it comes to enjoyment.

I hope this little experiment proves successful, and we see a Renaissance of adventure gaming on the Wii.

My Visions Are Coming True

2008-06-16T12:42:00.004-05:00

OK, so I may not be Nostradamus, but in the past few weeks a few of my rants about things I want have come to pass...

Earth to HBO, Get With The Times! / March 28, 2008

HBO has started selling some of their shows an iTunes. We're still a long way from getting new episodes of Entourage within a day or two of when they air. They only have six titles for sale, none are still on the air, and not all the episodes are available, but it's a start...

Better Exchange Support Coming to Apple Mail? / March 8, 2008

This one wasn't hard to predict, but sure enough, Apple has announced that full Exchange support will be part of the next version of Mac OSX, code named Snow Leopard. This means that Apple Mail will potentially be on equal footing with Outlook when it comes to interacting with Exchange Server.

I'm sure the nay-sayers will still come up with a reason to protest, but in my mind, this knocks down one of the final barriers keeping the Mac out of mainstream business. Couple this with the push-back Microsoft is getting on Vista, and I expect Apple's market share to grow substantially in the next 3 years.

I guess it's time for me to start the speculation machine up again. I need to keep ahead reality!

Hmmmm. Let's see...... Ah, I've got one:

I predict that I will win the lottery this week.

Here's to hoping...

List ALL Stored Procedures in an SQL Server Database

2008-06-03T09:45:00.003-05:00

Today I ran into a unique problem. I needed to reassign the permissions on a bunch of Stored Procedures in an SQL Server database. What a joyless task.

Now, I could do this by hand. Just open up Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio, right click on the Stored Procedure, and assign the permissions. In my case, however, I had hundreds of Stored Procedures to change. Doing this one by one would make me want to claw my eyes out.

The solution is to use some hidden system tables to get the list for me.

SELECT [name]
FROM sys.sysobjects
WHERE (type = 'P')

This gives me the list I want, but I can do a bit better:

SELECT 'GRANT EXECUTE ON OBJECT::[dbo].[' + name + '] TO [MyUserID];' AS Expr1
FROM sys.sysobjects
WHERE (type = 'P')
AND (LEFT([name],3) = 'DNN')

With this SQL, I generate the actual command needed to grand the new permissions to the Stored Procedure. I also use a WHERE condition to limit the effect to just Stored Procedures beginning with DNN, so I don't do this to everything, just the ones I want.

Once I run this, I just copy the results, paste it back into the SQL section of Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio, and execute. Bingo! My permissions have been altered.

Enjoy.

Generating Google Base XML files in VB.NET

2008-05-23T12:52:00.005-05:00

This may be a bit obscure, but since I struggled with this, I'm sure someone else in the future will struggle with it too. Hopefully this little post will help.

Goal: Create an XML file in RSS 2.0 format using VB.NET for use with Google Base

Challenge: Getting the .NET XmlSerializer object to generate the XML for you with the correct "g:" prefixes on the Google specific tags.

Making XmlSerializer generate basic XML is rather trivial. A quick search of the Interwebs will show you numerous examples. Essentially you just generate a class that matches the basic layout of the XML you want, populate the class, and send XmlSerializer off to covert it to XML.

Getting it to generate the Google specific XML needed for Google Base is a much more difficult problem, however. It becomes a bit tricky when you need some of the xml tags to be generic (for example, <title>), and others to have the Google prefix (ala <g:price>)

Solution: The key lies in a few hints you include in the Class definition to tell XmlSerializer what to do. Here's an example of the class I used:

RSS.vb

Imports System.Xml.Serialization

<XmlRoot(ElementName:="rss", Namespace:="")> _
Public Class rss
<XmlElementAttribute("channel")> _
Public channel As New rssChannel()
<XmlAttributeAttribute("version")> _
Public version As String = "2.0"
End Class

Public Class rssChannel
Public title As String
Public link As String
Public description As String
Public language As String = "en-us"
<XmlElementAttribute("item")> _
Public item As New rssChannelItems()
End Class

Public Class rssChannelItems
Inherits CollectionBase

Public Sub Add(ByVal Item As rssChannelItem)
Dim I As Integer = List.Add(Item)
End Sub

Default Public ReadOnly Property Item(ByVal Index As Integer) As rssChannelItem
Get
Return CType(List.Item(Index), rssChannelItem)
End Get
End Property
End Class

Public Class rssChannelItem
' Required
Public id As String
Public title As String
Public description As String
Public link As String
<XmlElement(Namespace:="http://base.google.com/ns/1.0")> _
Public price As Double

' Recommended
<XmlElement(Namespace:="http://base.google.com/ns/1.0")> _
Public provider_class As String
<XmlElement(Namespace:="http://base.google.com/ns/1.0")> _
Public year As Integer

' Optional
<XmlElement(Namespace:="http://base.google.com/ns/1.0")> _
Public agent As String
<XmlElement(Namespace:="http://base.google.com/ns/1.0")> _
Public area As String ' Sq Ft
<XmlElement(Namespace:="http://base.google.com/ns/1.0")> _
Public lot_size As String
<XmlElement(Namespace:="http://base.google.com/ns/1.0")> _
Public property_taxes As Double
<XmlElement(Namespace:="http://base.google.com/ns/1.0")> _
Public school_district As String
<XmlElement(Namespace:="http://base.google.com/ns/1.0")> _
Public zoning As String
End Class

Notice this part of the code:

<XmlElement(Namespace:="http://base.google.com/ns/1.0")> _

It is telling the XmlSerializer that I want the element to have the g: prefix. That's the revelation. Once you have that in place, you just create an instance of the class, populate it, and save the XML to disk.

Export.vb

Sub GenerateGoogleBase()
Dim rssFeed As rss = Nothing
Dim rssItem As rssChannelItem

Try
rssFeed = New rss

With rssFeed.channel
.title = "one"
.description = "two"
.link = "three"
End With

rssItem = new rssChannelItem
rssItem.id = "1234"
rssFeed.channel.item.Add(rssItem)

Dim xml As New XmlSerializer(GetType(rss), "http://
base.google.com/ns/1.0")
Dim strFile As New FileStream("C:\Test.xml", FileMode.Create)

Dim xmlns As New XmlSerializerNamespaces()
xmlns.Add("g", "http://base.google.com/ns/1.0")

xml.Serialize(strFile, rssFeed, xmlns)

Catch ex As Exception
End Try
End Sub

Wrap Up: As I said up front, yeah, this is a bit random and obscure. I'm sure I won't be the only person who struggles with this though. My hope is that the next person down the line will find this post and be helped by my struggle.

Big Thanks to Phil Weber for the basic RSS code, and Martin Honnen for helping me with making it work with Google Base.

Earth to HBO, Get With The Times!

2008-03-28T14:28:00.005-05:00

Why isn't HBO content available for sale on iTunes?

Sure, I know the standard answer. "HBO is a subscription service. If you want to watch HBO, you must sign up for it. If they sold their shows on iTunes, why would anyone pay their cable company for HBO?"

Blah, blah, blah.

Let's face facts, folks. There are some people who will always subscribe to HBO. It's convenient, it's practically forced down your throat when you sign up for cable, and it's ideal for channel surfing. Those people aren't going to ditch the monthly subscription for iTunes.

There are also a group of people that will never subscribe to HBO. They're not going to pay $15 per month -- every month -- for the few times that a movie comes on that they haven't already rented at NetFlix or BlockBuster. It's just not worth it to them to pay that much for an occasional movie. They might, however, pay $1.99 for an episode of Entourage.

Unfortunately, HBO does not allow that. They have the All or Nothing mentality. Subscribe, or you get nothing until the box set comes out a year later.

Here's a hint, HBO Execs. What you're really telling people is "Steal our content on Bit Torrent". If you don't offer a legal alternative where consumers can purchase your shows ala-cart, it will be stolen instead. That's the reality of the 21st century. It's your responsibility to provide the content when and where people want it. You no longer get to dictate how your shows are watched.

Maybe you should take a page out of Showtime playbook. They sell every one of their original series on iTunes. Weeds, The L Word, Californication, Penn & Teller BS -- everything. They don't seem to be suffering. In fact, what they are doing is making more money with their existing content, and by exposing people to their shows, they're probably getting a few extra subscribers as well.

So, get with the program HBO. It's 2008. Time to listen to your customers and embrace new technology.

Better Exchange Support Coming to Apple Mail?

2008-03-08T16:32:00.004-05:00

On Thursday, Apple announced its Roadmap for the future of the iPhone. Great fanfare was made of the forthcoming SDK and the Enterprise features being introduced in the 2.0 release of the iPhone software. There was much rejoicing.

One interesting tidbit mentioned during the press event was that Apple has licensed the Microsoft ActiveSync technology to tightly integrate the iPhone with Micrsoft's Exchange server. This nifty bit of software will allow things like push email, calendar and contact updates from the server to the iPhone. In a nutshell, Mail on the iPhone will now have the same tight integration with Exchange that Outlook does on the Windows OS.

This raised an interesting question in my mind....

Will Mail.app on OS X also benefit from this licensing deal?

Mr. Jobs and the Apple leadership went to great lengths to show that the iPhone is really just a small Mac. It runs the same underlying operating system code. It runs the same Objective-C based applications. It's a Mac in every sense, with a few minor enhancements.

If that's true, why couldn't the desktop versions on Mail.app, iCal and Address Book benefit from this new ActiveSync integration like the iPhone versions will? It should be fairly trivial to make the changes in both places, right?

Many corporate users have bemoaned the lack of true Exchange support in Mail.app. For that matter, even Entourage 2008 doesn't have full Exchange support. Both use IMAP4 to interact with the Exchange server. It works, but it's not the most elegant (or reliable) solution.

I may be reading the tea leaves incorrectly, but I'm guessing we're about to see a much more robust version of Apple Mail coming to a Mac desktop near you very soon. Here's to hoping...

Microsoft Access 2007 - Pretty New Face, Same Old Annoyances

2008-02-26T14:58:00.003-05:00

I use Microsoft Access.

I'm not particularly proud of it, but it's a fact of life. If you're going to work in Windows, Access is the easiest tool for some jobs. More importantly, many of my clients use it, so I must as well.

I've been using Access 2007 for a few days now, and I'm sadly disappointed. I had high hopes that after four years of development, many of the lingering bugs and missing features would be addressed. Alas, my hopes have been dashed. It may look nicer, but under the covers, it's the same old Access.

Does Microsoft actually improve anything from release to release, or just change the colors so they can charge you another $500???

It's now 2008, and this is version 12 of Access. Why do these problems still exist:

Importing external data still requires an ODBC connection. Really? In 2008 I still can't just give you an ADO connection string? I still must go setup a bleeping ODBC configuration in the Control Panel before I'm allowed to import from SQL Server? That's just silly.
No Multiple Selections. This is just ridiculous. Now that I've setup my ODBC connection, and entered in the password -- again - I'm given a list of tables I want to import. For my particular SQL Server database, that list is about 100 tables long. Why can't I select more than one at a time? AAARRRGGHHH!!! I have to click on every flargin table name one by one?!? Really? REALLY!?!?

I could just click the "SELECT ALL" button....if Access didn't mix System Tables in with User Tables. I don't want to import all the arcane System tables, just the data I've created.

At least Access 2007 allows me to save the group of tables I've selected -- a step in the right direction. That is, until next week when a new table gets added to the SQL Server. Then I have to start all over again to ensure this new table gets included.
No, Really, No Multiple Selections. One nice thing that Access does is allow you to copy and paste objects in the database. For example, you may want several tables with similar structures. You can just create the first one, copy it, then paste to create a second. Very handy..... Unless you want to copy more that one item at a time.
Status? What Status? Access 2007 changes the way items are show in the database. Instead of defaulting to icon or list views -- similar to how you see things in Windows Explorer -- Access 2007 gives you a list in a column. Of course, it omits basic nicities, like the ability to sort your items, or even give you a simple count of how many there are. Would it be so hard to tell me that I have 89 queries in the Status Bar? That is what it's for, right? Status...
Script this! I'm sure anyone who uses Access on a regular basis -- and deals with customers -- runs in to the same problem. Version control. The folks in Spokane have the latest version of the home-grown reporting database, but the folks in Butterfield aren't sure when the last time their database was updated. Worse yet, the folks in Utica are still running on Access 2000. They must be at least 3 upgrades behind but, they did have a few special reports created for them two years ago.

Wouldn't it be nice if there was a way to compare two copies of the database and find the difference?

It might not be ideal, but if you could at least script out all the tables, queries, forms and reports, you could use your favorite Diff tools to merge the variations and create one master. You then run the merged script and you've got the latest, greatest version of the database with all the changes included.

Honestly, I don't think the folks at Microsoft use Access themselves. If they did, these short-comings would be painfully obvious. They would certainly fix them just to make their own jobs a bit less cumbersome.

Well, there's always Office 2010 to look forward to. Maybe that one will have a green color scheme...

iPhone SDK -- Are we there yet?

2008-02-05T14:12:00.000-05:00

Tick tock, tick tock. It's February, Apple, can we get the iPhone Developer's Toolkit?

OK, so it's only the 5th of February, and maybe I'm a bit impatient. Still, many iPhone customers have been longing for this release since the phone was announced. With the SDK comes the great possibility that the iPhone reaches its true potential as a mobile computer. Games? A Flash Plugin? Remote Desktop? A Skype Client? It's easy to imagine the possibilities.

Waiting is the hardest part. Speculating, however, is very, very exciting...

iPod Shuffle Contest

2007-03-02T14:49:00.000-05:00

The folks over at EasyImage Software are running a contest right now where you could win a new iPod Shuffle.

You must actually purchase a copy of software to enter, but lots of the people I know use it, so it may fit for you too...

Check it out!

2 New Features I Want in Mac OSX Leopard

2006-11-28T15:55:00.001-05:00

The Mac community is buzzing about the new features forethcoming in Leopard. Since the Leopard Preview at the WWDC earlier this year, the rumor mill has been working overtime on speculation about what secret new features Apple would add. There are a lot of theories. Some good. Some bad. Some just plain ridiculous.

Here are the two that are on the top of my wish list:

Full NTFS Support
Time to face facts, Macs are in the minority. They may be "cool", they may be "hip", they may get all the press, but they're still on the outside looking in. It's still a Windows world, and the Mac is just living in it.

It's time to fit in better. Every Mac needs to be able to read and write to an NTFS drive. Every corporation uses NTFS. Most home computers now use NTFS. If you're going to network with PCs, and maybe even have Windows running on a Mac, OSX needs to be able to write to NTFS. Period.
True Windows Virtualization
See my comment above about it being a Windows world. Like it or not, you still can't get a Mac version every program out there. A few key packages are still Windows Only, and until that changes, Mac users need a rock-solid way to be able to run them and still keep using OSX.

The past year has seen huge advances in this area. We now have Boot Camp to allow us to dual boot between OSX and XP. We also have Parallels to let us run Windows inside OSX, and VMWare Fusion on the horizon. This is all good news, and light years ahead of where we used to be. Now I want more.

What I want is WINE on Steriods. CrossOver Extreme Edition. The Holy Grail. I want to be able to click on a Windows EXE and be able to run it on OSX.

Imagine a port of the WIN32 API built right into OSX. An interface between a Windows Application and the Mac OS. A way to allow every windows program to run on a Mac -- right out of the box. Every office application. Every accounting package. Every game. Everything.

The folks on the WINE project have come close. The folks at Apple can make it a reality. There has already been speculation that Microsoft might have even given Apple the source code for the Win32 API -- making this a much easier.

Granted, they're not "sexy", but these two changes alone make the Mac a much, much more compelling platform for anyone tempted to make the "Switch":

"No more viruses? No more malware? And I can still run that archane in-house, windows-only app I need for work? Sign me up!"

Check back here after the Leopard release to find out if I'm on the mark or off my rocker!