Category: Uncategorized

John Welch writes (in his Oc 27th entries) about people who upgrade to Leopard and then whine about how their software, which they need to do their jobs, stops working.

Boo, fucking, hoo.

While the rest of us are either waiting for the updates or finding workarounds (and considering small companies who manage to get their updates out in time), Mister Upgrade Moron is sitting outside playing with his poo-poo.

[I’d add a feed link but he’s moving to MT4 and I can’t find one!)

A rather stupid young woman in a red VW Polo (OXI 3333) clipped my rear wing and mirror and then drove off.

Grrrr.

In mere hours now, people all over the world will be cracking open cases of Leopard and drinking deep of the experience.

For our part we’ve been developing using the developer seeds from Apple’s Developer Connection and then testing on Tiger for compatibility. Why? There’s several reasons:

• 2 Million Macs sold last quarter.
• 1 million iPhones sold last quarter
• Untold numbers of iPod touch and Apple TV models sold

and these will all, from tomorrow, run Leopard (truth be told iPhone/iPod touch are already there).

We’ve been enjoying working with Interface Builder 3 and the rest of the new tools and we’ll be over at Mac-Sys on Friday to see if their copies of Leopard have arrived….

I have it.

Someone attacked me anonymously on one of my other blogs, denounced my writing, said bad things about me and hurt my feelings. I have a feeling I know them – (they’re in the UK, they seem to know enough about me, they use my first name with other people they know).

Ouch.

WTB says “Reads to me like they’re jealous.”

BestMan says “Has to be someone who knows you. With a bit of a chip. Could be any number of bottom feeders”

Yeah.

I know it’s an odd diversion but I was reading “A Walk on the Wild Side of New Age Finance from Financial Armageddon this morning.

They detailed the concept of Level 3 Assets:

Level 3 assets are those that trade so infrequently that there is virtually no reliable market price for them, and valuations for these assets are based on management assumptions.

So, these are things the bank owns but has no idea how much they are worth in any real sense so….they just make them up.

In other words, the value of 55 percent of Goldman’s assets depends on “internal models” or “management assumptions,” rather than market prices. I wonder if that played a role in the much better-than-expected quarterly results they reported recently?

Is it only investment banks which are allowed to play this game? I own a few pieces of crap which I’d possibly be able to sell on eBay because they’re pretty rare. Can I value them at £194 million and therefore laugh all the way to the bank? I think not. It’s a scam.

But there’s more.

…from 2004 to 2006, when conventional lending slowed and subprime lending accelerated, more than 2,500 banks, thrifts, credit unions and mortgage companies made a combined $1.5 trillion in high-interest-rate loans. Most subprime loans, which are extended to borrowers with sketchy credit, fall into this basket.

Makes it hard to be sorry for banks who are reporting losses and instability when they frankly were lying and cheating their way to insane profits over the last couple of years. Ethics, it seems, is always secondary to profit. Makes you wonder what sort of scam they’re running to make the balance books look better in future? Oh, yes, we spoke about that earlier – they’ll just revalue crap in their garage based on internal models.

I guess in today’s financial world small means big and prudence means shoveling scads of money to borrowers with reckless abandon.

Whether the borrowers can really afford it or not.

My entrepreneurial policy was always: there’s no shame in making a mistake or taking a risk, even if it doesn’t always pay out.

However there is shame in hawking loans to low-income families which have low introductory rates at the start and which then increase rates dramatically in order to milk every last penny from people who can’t afford to keep a financial advisor in their retinue.

Shame on you. Every one.

CalConnect.org

This is for my reference.

I seem to be running a link blog here. I guess it’s because I write at 4 other blogs and none of them are link blogs. Anyway, I digress.

16 things it takes most of us 50 years to learn makes me laugh out loud.

Excerpts:

3. You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests you think she’s pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.

8. If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be “meetings.”

15. Your true friends love you, anyway.

One of the biggest problems with being involved in several things at once, is that there comes a time when everything just piles up and you end up with a Gridlock Day. This is different to a Groundhog Day 🙂

I’m having one of those days today.

The clutch went on my car yesterday afternoon and I spent the afternoon doing two things.

1. Cursing that I didn’t go for the All-you-can-eat-as-long-as-it’s-less-than-1-GB-per-month data service.
2. Playing mini-Golf on my new phone.

This was because I needed to wait for my car to be recovered and brought to the garage. To their credit, the garage was very prompt, provided a courtesy car and I’m now road-worthy again. They also managed to give it a full service (though I have to pop back Monday for a new radiator). If I hadn’t been in the middle of nowhere I might have spent more time getting my mail but I kept myself busy enough. Some of those mini-golf holes are really quite ingenious.

Anyway, that was yesterday.

Today I’m playing catchup.

Seeing clients (WiFi network installation, image server crashing), working on web sites, discussing designs, finding two new graphic designers and chasing down advertisers for one of the web sites has been the majority of my day.

And tomorrow I will do today’s work….
Continue reading “I make bees look idle.”

We’ve taken the shackles off and now everyone can have a go.

We’ve been using SyncBridge for nearly a month now and we’ve seen the good and the bad of iCal and SyncServies for more than 6 months now and come through with a smile.

So it’s out. In Public Beta. It’s free to use for the next month and after that, the subscription starts but why am I telling you all of this – it’s free for a month so GO TRY IT OUT

I’m reminded of Aidan saying that allowing others to use SyncBridge was akin to letting his kid outside unsupervised and that is certainly the way we feel now as we had several attempted downloads even before the links went active.

This is a big deal in many ways.

• It’s the first commerical RubyCocoa app. Ever. No, really.
• It’s the first commercial Nitro app (apart from those written by Nitro’s creator).
• It’s the first commerical app using ZenObfuscate.
• Infurious is the first Mac software company in Northern Ireland.
• If Aidan is the father of SyncBridge, then that makes me the bearded Auntie…..



Related posts:

1. Moving from WEBrick to lighttpd/FastCGI in Nitro
2. One Dot Oh – the beta ends!
3. RubyCocoa (and SyncServices)
4. RubyCocoa OK to bundle

Aidan posted about making technology (and concepts) a bit more accessible to the rank and file of internet users. There is a followup which says that a big problem with accessibility of new technology is the language barrier. In Europe alone, most people seem to speak their own language and English (except the English, who speak neither).

Why would you ignore the 80-odd million people in Germany? What about France? Spain? China? They have money too!

We’ve secured the French and Spanish translators….a few more to go I reckon!