kluner.net

A nice post from MacRumors points out that Samsung continues to poke fun at Apple users, who stand in line to get the a newly launched product.

Now, as a dutch person, I am blissfully oblivious to the Super Bowl, but one thing I do know is:

Super Bowl ads do not come cheap

So, Samsung thinks people are wrong for being dedicated to a certain brand other then theirs (Apple, no surprises so far). And wants to use advertising to ‘convert’ such people to purchasing the ‘right’ choice. (their product). Nothing shocking so far.

So, they have spent millions ( from what I’ve learned, Super Bowl Ads really do not come cheap) on an ad, in which they alienate their prospective customers, by – basically – calling them idiots. Now, I am not one to complain when a big corporation pisses away it’s money. But seriously. Did you even pay attention in marketing school? Never, ever, ever, piss of people you want as your customer.

For people who buy Apple stuff, your products are probably just not interesting enough. From my own personal experience with Samsung: apple hardware is a hell of a lot better quality. If I spend money, I don’t mind spending more money, if I get a better product. Apple delivers. Every damn time.

Not that I would personally stand in line for it.

Apple, general

I, like many others, like the iPad. I don’t own one, and never have, because as much as I love my iPhone, I don’t like one simple thing:

- it’s got no separation for users

Separation for users, while a common thing on computers, including OS X, is very uncommon on phones and tablets. On phones like the iPhone this is entirely justifiable because phones in general have only one intended user. It’s a PIM, or personal information device. Computers are very much the opposite, where more then one users frequently accesses the same computer both in a work or a home setting.

Enter the tablet. The tablet seems to fit right between those two groups, but one thing is for sure: a tablet is often shared amongst people in a household.

Now comes the issue of user separation: my girlfriend and I both have email accounts, Facebook and twitter accounts, etc, that we would like to access on a tablet we would share. We also both have iPhone’s and Mac’s. But neither of us has any interest or business in the other’s email or Facebook, and the mentioned apps are not build to support more then one user for the most part, anyway.

Now, one might argue that we could just choose not to use email, Facebook, twitter, and what not, on the tablet, and this is possible. However, how much sense does it make to purchase a device for about € 499, and then be utterly limited in it’s use? And no, buying two would simply be wasteful.

So, one seemingly innocent feature, would probably open up a whole new piece of the market. I know it would for us. I imagine tablet manufacturers would much rather sell everyone in the household his or her own tablet. But in cases like this it’s not about making the most money, but just doing what’s right. You’re probably not going to loose sales over it. Some households will still buy more then one tablet, simply because the demand is high enough to justify such a purchase.

Apple, general Apple, iOS, iPad

In memoriam, Steve Jobs, 1955 – 2011

Apple has used the following text on more then one occasion, and I think it sums up Steve Jobs like few other texts could:

Here’s to the crazy one. The misfit. The rebel. The troublemaker. The round peg in the square holes. The one who see things differently. He was not fond of rules. And he had no respect for the status quo. You can quote him, disagree with him, glorify or vilify him. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore him. Because he changed things. He pushed the human race forward. And while some may see him as the crazy one, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

- Apple Inc.

my friend Marjolein also sums it up quite beautifully in her blogpost.

Uncategorized Apple, memoriam, Steve Jobs

One of the many things I like about Mac OS X (Server) is the fact it’s a pure-bred UNIX. It’s even certified as such. Not to mention that the Director of Unix Technology at Apple is the person who at one point started the FreeBSD project: Jordan K. Hubbard. (I love FreeBSD, so I’m very appreciative of Jordan’s work)

Another reason I like OS X as much as I do, is because literally anything can be done from the command-line, something a Unix nerd like myself thoroughly loves to do. But, OS X has advanced features like Access Control Lists and all that fancy stuff, so sometimes I can be a bit of a learn to find out how exactly OS X does things compared to other members of the Unix family.

Now, I mentioned ACL’s, when you do something rather simple like ‘ls -la on /Groups’, you get this:

server:Groups username$ ls -la
total 0
drwxr-xr-x+  6 root  wheel   204 Aug  7 21:57 .
drwxr-xr-x  33 root  wheel  1190 Aug 17 09:29 ..
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel     0 Jul 27 21:29 .localized
drwxrwx---+  5 root  admin   170 Aug 13 12:37 group1
drwxrwx---+  2 root  admin    68 Aug  7 21:57 group2
drwxrwx---+  2 root  admin    68 Jul 27 21:47 workgroup

which is nice enough, but what if I wanted to see the real permissions, including the ACL’s? There’s a switch for that:

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ls -lae

Wich produces the following output:

total 0
drwxr-xr-x+  6 root  wheel   204 Aug  7 21:57 .
 0: user:_spotlight inherited allow list,search,file_inherit,directory_inherit
drwxr-xr-x  33 root  wheel  1190 Aug 17 09:29 ..
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel     0 Jul 27 21:29 .localized
drwxrwx---+  5 root  admin   170 Aug 13 12:37 group1
 0: group:group1 allow list,add_file,search,delete,add_subdirectory,delete_child,readattr,writeattr,readextattr,writeextattr,readsecurity,writesecurity,chown,file_inherit,directory_inherit
 1: user:_spotlight inherited allow list,search,file_inherit,directory_inherit
drwxrwx---+  2 root  admin    68 Aug  7 21:57 group2
 0: group:group2 allow list,add_file,search,delete,add_subdirectory,delete_child,readattr,writeattr,readextattr,writeextattr,readsecurity,writesecurity,chown,file_inherit,directory_inherit
 1: user:_spotlight inherited allow list,search,file_inherit,directory_inherit
drwxrwx---+  2 root  admin    68 Jul 27 21:47 workgroup
 0: 839AE424-BBF3-442E-BAD6-C8B5E8B596F5 allow list,add_file,search,delete,add_subdirectory,delete_child,readattr,writeattr,readextattr,writeextattr,readsecurity,writesecurity,chown,file_inherit,directory_inherit
 1: user:_spotlight inherited allow list,search,file_inherit,directory_inherit

It might be a bit daunting to read through, but heck if it does’t show you exactly what you need to see. It’s really easy seeing ACL’s on Mac OS X with ls!

In case you’re wondering, the ’839AE424-BBF3-442E-BAD6-C8B5E8B596F5′ part corresponds to a UserID in OpenDirectory/LDAP.

Apple, FreeBSD ACL, ls, mac OS X

So, for a project I needed to get something running in order to insure memcached would keep on running. The (for me) natural choice for this was daemontools (0.76 at time of writing).

There are a couple of things you have to pay attention to, in order to get this going on RHEL 6. (and I suppose many other Linux distro’s)

Phase 1 – get the source and compile it

get the source tarball here (note: this might not be the current version anymore!) and download it to /usr/local/src

• unpack it with tar -zvxf daemontools-0.76.tar.gz and cd into admin/daemontools-0.76.
• edit src/conf-cc and add ‘-include /usr/include/errno.h’ at the end of the line. (anywhere is fine, really)
• run package/install

this should give you the needed files in /command and an existing /service

Phase 2 – fixing startup

Daemontools requires a somewhat different approach to starting up then you might be used to. ( the most common way being /etc/init.d/<name>, and using chkconfig to influence when it starts). Daemontools should be started on boot, and init must be told to restart it when it dies. This ensures continued operation. The installer you ran in phase 1, took care of this by adding a line in /etc/inittab, but that’s an old method, and for the sake of continued operation (and working straight away) we’ll use the new method:

• Remove the added line from /etc/inittab.
• cd /etc/init
• create a new file called svscan.conf, and put the following contents in:

start on runlevel [345]
respawn
exec /command/svscanboot

now, tell init, it should re-read it’s configuration, and then start svscanboot:

• initctl reload-configuration
• initctl start svscan

if you check now, you should see a happily running svscan, and daemontools is ready to kick some:

2676 ?        Ss     0:00 /bin/sh /command/svscanboot
2678 ?        S      0:00  \_ svscan /service

Enjoy! I hope this little post was helpful.

Linux, projects, work linux, open source, OS, red hat

This website is now IPv6 compatible!

I encourage everyone to join in.

general, networking, projects IPv6

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int getRandomNumber()
{
    return 4; // chosen by fair dice roll. guaranteed to be random.
}

for people who don’t understand what this means: this is how Sony’s PS3 got hacked.

general sony, stupidity

I can finally, after being long overdue, add the UK, and more specifically: Scotland to my list of countries visited.

Last month, Kirsteen and I travelled to Glasgow on a family and friends visiting trip.

I absolutely loved it. Though we did find the hotel lacking. Not worth what they charge. Though the breakfast at the Park Inn ( previously: Langs ) was very nice indeed.

I look forward to going back to Glasgow soon.

family, general glasgow, scotland, travel

My friend Timea Huzar pointed me to Sean Tibbetts’ awesome blog. For those who are not in the know, Sean has been the live bass player of Kamelot, and has now become the official full-time bassist of the band. (and he deserves it!). Apparently, not many people where in the know that Sean had his own site and blog. So people, bookmark till you drop!

Music kamelot, metal, Music

When you see the backup of a (non localhost) client failing with the message:

Fatal error: Failed to authenticate Storage daemon

Keep in mind that bacula uses tcpwrappers, though probably not in the way you expect it.

instead of doing:

bacula-sd : 111.222.333.444

do:

$name-sd : 111.222.333.444

where $name is the name you specified in the bacula-sd.conf

Most services that use tcpwrappers (tcpd) use the name of the service (bacula-sd in this case), but bacula has a cute approach to it that listens only to the name you defined for the service. As far as I can tell this applies only to bacula-sd, and not bacula-dir or bacula-fd.

So, say you would have the following config in bacula-sd.conf:

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Storage {                             # definition of myself
  Name = foo.bar-sd
  SDPort = 9103                  # Director's port
  WorkingDirectory = "/var/lib/bacula"
  Pid Directory = "/var/run/bacula"
  Maximum Concurrent Jobs = 20
}

then your /etc/hosts.allow would read:

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foo.bar-sd : 111.222.333.444

Please note that you will still need to take care of your passwords on both ends, any mismatches there will results in no backups being made. Be sure to test your backups regularly.

general bacula, open source