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Apple's big iPad announcement last week has been sinking in for the past few days, and I've concluded that the iPad sucks. I could live without multitasking if push notifications work (with only one exception). The lack of a camera and the silly USB and SD card adapters were dumb design choices, but the iTunes syncing bothers me the most. iTunes is slow, bloated, and horrible.

And the iTunes syncing proves to me that Apple really doesn't understand what makes Amazon's Kindle so great. Yes, the eInk screen is awesome for reading in direct sunlight (except in temperatures below 41° F), and yes, the free wireless 3G service is a nice perk. But there's one reason why the Kindle is a perfect gift for anyone in the family:

Kindle owners never need to connect their device to a computer.

Until this is true of the iPad too, I don't see it mimicking the success of the Kindle.

Pre-orders for Windows 7 went up yesterday. If you expect to upgrade an XP or Vista computer anytime in the next year, pre-order Windows 7 before July 11 to save half off retail. Home Premium (super-duper edition?) is only $50.

Mac and Linux remain my environments of choice for real work, but Windows 7 does look promising. I definitely expect to upgrade my gaming rig at some point, and $50 feels right for a Windows upgrade.

In other news, I'm having too much fun with my iPhone to write about it. More later...

Apple unleashed the 3.0 software update upon iPhones and iPod Touches everywhere yesterday. I've been enjoying all the new goodies, particularly search, copy and paste, and landscape keyboards, which you can read about elsewhere.

This iPod feature caught me by surprise! Apple finally revamped the podcast playback controls, eliminating the repeat, genius, and shuffle buttons that made little sense for audio podcasts. The new left button e-mails an iTunes link to the podcast. The center button leaps backwards thirty seconds, an operation I've frequently needed with audio content. The right button doubles or halves the playback speed, a feature I've quickly come to love. The position slider has been revamped too: while seeking to a new position, I can slide my finger down the screen to reduce the speed of movement. This makes finding a particular spot in a long podcast tremendously easy!

Expect my next several posts to be about the iPhone. My favorite IM client has yet to be updated for push events and my new iPhone 3G S is sitting in a box in Kentucky. I'm quite excited to finally be retiring my well-worn nerd taxed model.

Over the past month, I've had several friends message me on MSN Messenger with something like this:

"check out these awesome pics from the awesome party LOL
http://www.gone-wild-patry-pics.com"

When I follow the link in the message, I'm greeted with a prompt for my MSN account information. The page doesn't look reputable at all, and the "terms of service" are plastered all over the bottom.

By providing MSN account information, a visitor grants this company permission to log into the MSN account and send advertisements to everyone on the buddy list. Among other interesting clauses in the "terms of service," the company also claims the following.

• "... the right to change the terms of use / privacy policy at any time without notice."
• "... this agreement shall prevail if there is any conflict between this agreement and the terms of use you accepted when you signed up with MSN."
• "... TST Management, Inc is NOT agreeing to MSN's terms of use and therefore not bound by them."
• "You expressly consent to the exclusive venue and personal jurisdiction of the courts located in the Republic of panama for any actions arising from or relating to this agreement."

The most entertaining aspect of all this is that I know exactly which friends fell for this trick. I would encourage anyone who provided login credentials to this fradulent web site to change your MSN password immediately! Your friends will thank you.

I'm sure most Mac users encounter situations when they're forced to use a Windows keyboard. In my case, I attach a Mini and ocassionally my MacBook to a KVM switch shared by Vista, Ubuntu, and a Windows keyboard.

Up until now, I've just dealt with the fact that Windows keyboards switch the Option and Command key locations. I've trained my brain to use the Windows key rather than the key immediately adjacent to the space bar when I need Command. Previous versions of Mac OS had a feature that remapped the modifier keys, but this was a global setting that remapped all keyboards whether they be Windows or not.

I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered this dialog under Leopard's keyboard system preferences.

That new drop down list at the top lets me create mappings for all keyboards or specific keyboards, identiifed by their USB device name. Very nice, Apple!

I wanted to do something very simple over the weekend. I wanted to set up my Windows Vista computer to backup automatically to a drive shared on the network by my Mac Mini. In this day and age, digital information has become so important in our everyday lives that one would hope this is now relatively straightforward, right?

First, let me say that I can accomplish this in my sleep on any non-Windows computer. I work, live, and play on unix operating systems. I know how to configure key pairs and schedule a regular cron job to rsync files over a secure ssh connection. These technologies have a significant learning curve, but they work consistently and reliably.

My first hurdle was Leopard's horrible SMB support. Enabling Windows file sharing on Leopard confronts the user with an intimidating dialog box that warns about storing passwords in a less secure manner. The password on my primary account is important, so I decided to create a separate backup user. Unfortunately, Leopard "sharing only" accounts don't appear on the list of accounts available for Windows file sharing. I had to create a full user account, complete with a home directory.

The next hurdle was logging in from Vista. As I discovered after a solid half hour of tinkering, Leopard's SMB support only accepts the account's full name, not the abbreviated short version.

Vista comes with a backup tool that only supports network backups to Windows file shares. Once I had file sharing with the Mac working, I happily pointed the backup tool at that location. Windows complained about not having "full access," and Leopard doesn't have any option for enabling a higher level of privileges beyond "read & write." So there goes that idea. My Vista computer doesn't store anything more valuable than saved games and screenshots. It's not worth the time to hack something together for automatic regular backups.

Microsoft, how about adding support for backing up to SFTP or WebDAV? These are not new file sharing protocols, and they work cross-platform!

And to be fair, Apple's Time Machine is equally frustrating when backing up to non-Apple computers over the network. Time Machine relies on specific features of HFS+, including a hack in Leopard to enable hard links for directories, so network backups must create an HFS+ disk image on the remote computer.

I recently came across an interview with Tim Minchin, and I think he's great! Unfortunately, he isn't on tour in the United States this year.

This news is a couple weeks old, but I wanted to mention it anyway. Several years ago I mentioned a flaw in MD5. Seeking a proof of concept, a team of researchers successfully forged a CA certificate that could sign any certificate they desired. The resulting certificate would be implicitly trusted by all major web browsers. The team presented their results at the 25th Chaos Communication Congress last month in Berlin.

I wanted to briefly describe their ingenious technique but gave up after realizing how many prerequisite concepts I'd need to introduce. Read their excellent paper if you're interested in the details. The team used a farm of PlayStation 3 consoles to compute a CA certificate that collided with a carefully crafted certificate issued by RapidSSL.

There's no immediate risk to users. This development is primarily a wakeup call to certificate authorities to stop relying on MD5 immediately. MD5 is broken.

A recent article in the Sunday Times regarding Google's carbon emissions sent the corporation's public relations team into a frenzy.

The Times journalist apparently had an axe to grind with Google. Alex Wissner-Gross, the scientist cited in the Times article, retorts that his research didn't even mention Google. The official Google blog claims that their data centers are the most energy efficient data centers in the world. A single Google search consumes about 0.3 watt-hours and releases a mere 0.2 grams of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Yellow journalism at its finest!

I'm proud to say that this blog does not run PHP or MySQL!

PHP is the most prevalent web programming language thanks its ease of installation and popularity among web designers. MySQL is the most common open source database management system (on web sites, at least). Both are horrid pieces of software haphazardly thrown together. I'll surely rant about them later.

This blog is powered by Apache, Perl, PostgreSQL, and Movable Type with a little help from mod_include, all running on Ubuntu. (Alas, the FreeBSD VPS hosts were not as appealing.) I may be stuck using PHP and MySQL at work, but at least I can liberate myself at home!