Hypocritical government

This shouldn't be news to most, but our government is quite hypocritical. Today I was reading about a bunch of men that were arrested in Saudi Arabia for flirting with women. They were arrested by the religious police. Here is a country that has no religious freedom and is a dictatorship, ummm, I mean kingdom. Yet, the US considers Saudi Arabia an ally and hasn't made moves to invade it. The US has tried to intervene in other countries that are dictatorships and have governments that the US doesn't like, but because Saudi Arabia has oil and is strategically placed, the US keeps it as a bed buddy. Is Saudi Arabia any different than communist governments or say Cuba?

Mess of wall chargers

Yesterday I went to use my Sony Reader and it said "Low Battery". This was very strange as it had been plugged into the charger for 2 days, so it should be charged. I looked at the Reader and it said it used a 5.2 V charger. I looked at the charger and it said 5 V. Hmmm. That was strange, so I dug through my chargers and found the 5.2 V charger. The 5 V charger was from my PSP; I plugged the 5.2 V charger in and this morning, the Reader was all set to go. Now, the two chargers had identical plugs on them, so it was quite easy to make the mistake. If Sony had a clue, it would have made the same charger for both products as it would have saved on manufacturing costs and would have reduced confusion for people like me that own both products.

Does beta mean anything anymore?

I'm currently testing ReceiptWallet 2.0 beta and have been getting reports from people that say they're using ReceiptWallet 2.0 (not saying beta) and are mad that they have problems. While I can understand being mad about having problems, but that's why it is in beta so that people test it. I have several warnings indicating that the software is not finished and to backup data, but people seem to ignore those warnings. In my preferences, I have "Look for Beta Versions and Releases" as an option; I'm not sure people understand what Beta means, so I've changed it to "Look for Untested Versions and Releases". Could that be clearer? When my website is redone, I'll also make sure that any references to beta also indicate "untested".

I think that developers have diluted the term beta by just throwing stuff out there and getting people to try it; for instance, look on VersionTracker for items that are beta versions. They are just mixed in with everything else and the unsuspecting consumer, says "oh, a new version, let me get it." without realizing that beta means "untested". I don't throw my beta versions on VersionTracker because I want people to make a conscious effort to get the versions.

Half baked PPP implementation

I love that Mac OS X is built on a UNIX core as I can use a command line to do stuff and write shell scripts. However, in some cases, Apple has wrapped a pretty interface on top of some UNIX stuff and made a mess as such as with the case with Mac OS X server; I wrote about this awhile back. This is also the case with PPP. System Preferences (and under Tiger, Internet Connect) hides the underlying PPP implementation. For most people, this works OK, but the biggest problem is that if you enter your username and password (for providers that require it), unplug the modem and plug it into a different USB port, that information is no longer associated with that modem. This is because PPP tracks the modem based on UNIX /dev port, i.e. /dev/usbmodem1d11. Each USB port is uniquely identified and if you plug in a hub, it changes the /dev port as well. So this can be quite problematic and each time you plug in the device into a different port, you'll get a different entry in Network Preferences. What a mess. To make matters worse, the PPP implementation uses the keychain sometimes and then sometimes picks the wrong entry in the keychain if there are 2 entries with the same account name.

So why would I care about PPP these days when most people connect over a broadband connection and have their Macs connected via AirPort or Ethernet? One of my clients manufactures cellular modems, so I have to write code to deal with switching ports. Dealing with the PPP password is a huge headache. This would be so much simpler if the wireless carriers used Mobile IP which doesn't require a username and password (Sprint uses it in the US). Why carriers require a username and password, I have no idea. When the modem connects to the network, they know who is connecting based on the ESN (Electronic Serial Number) of the modem, so why not authenticate off that? It's not like normal people can change the ESN (it's illegal and the tools are not readily available).

I'm sure that Apple will continue to ignore PPP as it works most of the time for most people. They should be tracking the USB modem based on serial number or vendor ID and product ID; something that won't change.

(Yes, this is beat on Apple week.)