May, 2012 | Ryan Rampersad

D10: Tim Cook Interview

I took a few notes yesterday during Tim Cook’s D10 interview. Overall, due to AllThingsD’s lack of video live streaming, I’d say I only have half the picture – I know what Cook said but not how he said it. Anyway, I have some thoughts on some of what he said.

Many products coming, more stores

The earth horizon image he had behind him as he said that during the iPad 3 keynote comes to mind.

US manufacturing

He says not many people know, and normal people probably do not, but then who was normal among that crowd, that the iPhone and iPad processors are manufactured in Texas and that the glass is made in the Corning factory in Kentucky. It would be nice in the long run to have the design and creation in the same country, but the climate here is just not up that task yet.

“I don’t see the tablet replacing the need for all PCs”

With all of the post-PC era garble, this is a much needed statement. This, I think, is what everyone needed to hear. PCs, and by that I mean actual computers with huge processors, screens and keyboards, will be important going into the future despite tablets being increasingly more competent at meeting normal people’s needs.

“No one should be able to get an injunction off a standards-essential patent”

That actually makes sense. Oh wait. If it’s a standard, how did it get patented in the first place? Let’s say I steal your method of doing something – everyone steals it. Someone declares it a standard after that, is it a standard?

Why don’t you have more than iPhone…? “Our North Star is to make the best product… there’s not a policy or commandment that ‘Thou shalt have One.” – Notes: avoids fragmentation with one screen size and one App Store with one policy

Cook could have answered, “we have three iPhones on the market right, the 3GS, 4 and 4S.” But he didn’t. When the screen size changes, I think the smaller screens will continue to exist indefinitely.

Why not make a $99 iPhone? “… I’m not going to conjecture.”

I did not understand Walt’s question here. Like an actual $99 iPhone? Because, last time I checked, there’s a $99 iPhone 4 selling down the street.

“[TV] is not the same market size of the phone business or the Mac business… we are going to keep pulling the string and see where this takes us”

TV is hard. People just go out to their local BestBuy and pick up a TV and then take it home and keep it for five years. Maybe the old turn around rate was ten years, but bigger is better now and the prices are low. Apple does not do low in an ordinary sense.

“[Apple] hasn’t had an issue for the most part getting content”

I wonder if Apple really hasn’t had issues. They pulled out of the revival of the music industry ten years ago. They somehow convinced them that iTunes Match was a good idea. They have movie rentals and purchasing. And there was a Tuesday I could just never forget, with the Beatles.

“you will be really pleased with some of the things you see over the coming months this. We have some cool ideas about what Siri can do.”

There are two obvious choices here. Expanded internal capabilities, so you can ask it to bring up apps, to open Apple apps and interact with them to some degree. But then there’s the more important factor, which be to allow for an API and let developers hook into Siri. That would be the cool part, but then also quite a mess.

Education discounts are “not insignificant” and will continue, textbook nonsense

But where’s the iPad education discount?

wget caching

On a recent podcast, the studio experienced some major Internet connectivity issues. We couldn’t use any direct quotes or reference any of material so we were kind of stuck. I thought I could rig my server to prefetch all of our show note pages prior to the show in the future. I only needed single pages with mostly complete assets. I found a great Superuser thread on this topic via user35651.

from the wget manual (1.12):

“Actually, to download a single page and all its requisites (even if they exist on separate websites), and make sure the lot displays properly locally, this author likes to use a few options in addition to ‘-p’: ”

wget -E -H -k -K -p url

This solution works great, but I also add in -nd -w 3. That will add in a no directory switch – essentially preventing the creation of thousands of folders, and a small delay between each request so I don’t destroy the local internet in the house, nor the remote servers.

1and1 PHP Woes

Many moons ago I commented on the lack of suitable updates to the installation of PHP on 1and1 shared hosting. At that time, I changed a setting called global php version from the standard php 5 to the unusual php dev in hopes of finding a special hiding place for PHP 5.3 support. Today, it kicked in for the first time. Badly.

This blog and The-Nexus.tv went down to memory allocation errors caused by PHP 5.4.3. To fix the problem, I simply reverted the change I made months ago (though at the time had no actual affect) from “php dev” to “php 5″. Everything went back, seemingly, to normal a few minutes later and I began writing this post. You might want to watch out if you’re using 1and1.

Modifying WordPress Feed Titles

The-Nexus.tv feeds currently display just the episode title. This creates an ambiguity when visitors either subscribe to the Master Feed or when a user subscribes to multiple singular series feeds. Today, I made a minor change that adds both the series name and the episode number.

The WordPress API is a travesty, but despite that, it’s actually very easy to change feeds. I used the_title_rss filter.

add_filter('the_title_rss', 'convergence_feed_title_filter');

My function is called convergence_feed_title_filter.

function convergence_feed_title_filter($content) {
  global $wp_query;
  $post_id = $wp_query->post->ID;
  $permalink = get_permalink($post_id);
  $categories = get_the_category($post_id);
  $category = $categories[0];
  $string = $category->cat_name . ' #' . get_episode_number($permalink) . ": " . $content;
  return $string;
}

First, we need to know what the current query is, then we need to get the post_id out of it. Episode numbers at The-Nexus.tv are stored conveniently in the permalinks, so I get the permalink and then categories. Why? Because single_cat_title does not work well or as advertised. Running get_the_category works, but because there could be multiple categories, I just pulled the data from the first choice. That data is the cat_name, and then I concatenated everything into a neat string: series name, episode number and then original title.

Centralization

It might appear that I am totally neglecting this blog. I am. My podcast is much more interesting for me in terms of use and design right now. I read the tech news daily and I am writing about it elsewhere. For instance, prior to clearing out my spam filters this morning, I wrote briefly on the Microsoft Summer Upgrade plan. I posted this news back to my Google+ feed. Why? Because I have integration in Chrome that is so easy it let’s me quickly get in and write a quick nit-picks or praising about it. It’s quick and easy.

Now, I don’t expect any other alternative to be that easy. I have used Tumblr but I don’t like that they host it and they force me to use the same log in for every single different blog I have on their service. Twitter doesn’t make the cut either since it’s again not hosted by me and there’s some word limit or something that prevents me from actually writing about anything.

No, instead, I propose more of a centralization. Such that my brief commentaries and my extended technological postings can exist in a single unified location. It would be wonderous to import my tweets every so infrequently like I had in the old days too. It would be nice to have these musings to be posted to not only Twitter, but simultaneously to also Google+ and Facebook.

If you’re an avid feed reader, you might have noticed a couple of mysterious entires a couple weeks ago. If you had followed through on those links, you would have found one of two things: either that the link brought you to the site I was actually talking about or more likely that the post simply did not exist on the site itself and was only present in the feeds. That was my secret testing phase and while it did not work as I had intended, since then I have become versed in the arts of feed manipulation and foul WordPressian treachery. If I were reading my feeds in the future, I would keep in mind things might look different and are probably going to be changing slightly (and by slightly, I mean considerably).

So that’s the plan. Stay tuned.

Fall Schedule 2012

After meeting with my adviser a few days ago, I picked my classes for the Fall Semester of 2012. You can pick up a feed of the schedule here, if you’d like.

I have three lectures Monday, Wednesday and Friday: Statistics, Machine Architecture and History of Science. I have the lectures for Linear Algebra Monday and Wednesday. The discussions are all neatly placed on Thursdays, so that would be for Machine Architecture, History of Science and Linear Algebra. Despite the Linear Algebra lectures and discussion being late, I did this my first semester at the University of Minnesota so it’s not such a big deal. Plus, it gives me time to do some homework.

But the jewel of this schedule is that I have no classes on Tuesdays.