Archive for July, 2014

The internet resource bloat

Saturday, July 26th, 2014

Why, oh my, is it necessary to run a 10 MB, 1:11m, 720p (no less) video on the main PayPal website front page background. You know, the page where people go to login, check their balance, and such, …

You wonder the internet is slow? Getting slower and slower? Your monthly “flatrate” (*lol*) volume used up faster and faster?

Wonder no more:

The NSA and the global surveillance state

Thursday, July 24th, 2014

So for about a decade the NSA and it’s five or so dwarf friends focussed on reading all our email, half naked holiday beach posts on Facebook, business contracts and CAD drawings send by email, every appointment for dinner with your girlfriend or wive (or both) and such, …

… and they can not even predict the annexation of Crimea or a war in Ukraine coming, nor find the missing MH370 plane, or show actual evidence who shot the MH17 plane, nor a sign of AH5017.

Now that are priorities, right? All our email, and most personal (and thus usually unimportant to others) communiques - however, the actual real threads, like, you know, war, soldiers, weapons, rockets, and lost planes?

Brave new world - probably no espionage to gain from that, … :-/ !!!

So the skills of the NSA in this day and age boil down to: ☑ reading emails, ☑ watching nude citizens, … But unfortunately not the classic spy skill set like, ☐ robbing thru the dessert, ☐ monitoring actual criminals, ☐ and such … I suggest they watch one or another James Bond movie as free training material, …

NEC EA244UHD 4k

Thursday, July 17th, 2014

So now NEC finally comes out with a 4k IPS display. Unfortunately they lost me as a customer already early this year, …

Wondering if they also use MST, and how the compatibility is with Mac OS X ;-)

Mac OS X (Mavericks) caches .plists

Sunday, July 13th, 2014

For App development and debugging I sometimes manual edit our own App’s preference plist and wondered for some time why these tweaks have no effect anymore, …

Turns out since (at least) Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) they are system-wide cached, and synced by some syncdefaultsd (or so), …

The death or rise of UI toolkits?

Friday, July 4th, 2014

Back in the days of PCs and workstations we first had some platform specific UI libs, and then X11, Motif, Gtk+ Qt, Fltk, Fox etc. pp.

Mostly because people were tired of non-portable UI code, having to rewrite most of the App for each and every platform.

And today? Most devs are back to using platform specific code for UIKit, Android, WP8, … insanely sad :-/ Ok, they mostly just instantiate a WebView anyway, … ;-)