Penny Arcade covers WWDC10

Penny Arcade’s take on Steve Jobs’ iPhone 4 demo failure at the WWDC 2010 keynote. Still not sure why Steve didn’t use a cable for the networking, given that the demo phones had cables to do the display anyway. I guess it distracted from his fireside chat on the edge of the stage.
Dividing the 20 or so available channels by the 570 base stations probably wasn’t going to work particularly well regardless of what hardware was in use, it was an ‘extreme networking event’. But a great time to test your app to see how it goes in times of network weirdness 🙂

Will the iPad crush AT&T’s network?

Given the difficulties AT&T’s network had coping with the traffic generated by the iPhone, I wonder if it will be able to keep up with the iPad (even after they announced the revamping of their infrastructure)? After all, Google Maps is going to have to draw a lot more tiles to show your copilot the directions as you drive along. Image sizes will be bigger, and so too will App sizes. Anyone know what size the icons are on the iPad?

iTablet iPhone iThingy roundup

Aside from the usual random speculation about Steve Jobs worldchanging release in a few hours time, there have been a few interesting articles recently, namely

I also wonder what the cool feature will be… Mesh networking? Biofeedback? Merging with other nearby devices to form a larger device? Inbuilt projector?
It will also be interesting to see if Apple launches any updates to their 17 inch MacBook Pro as they would probably always have done if they were attending MacWorld this year. Also, I predict an iPhone software update, an iTunes update and a Mac OS X update.
Now, lets sit back and see how wrong we all are…

Free Mac First Person Shooters

From the Wikipedia entry via Slashdot discussion:

Westnet ripoff

So, I churned to TPG on 1st December, the actual connection was swapped sometime around noon.

Westnet charged me a full December usage. And you need to notify them to close the account (you’d think the fact you can’t connect to it would be sufficient…) Not that they’d answered any of my other e-mails anyway.

I guess the lesson is, make sure your cutover day is the last day of the month? Or does that just mean the new ISP charges you a full month for starting before the 1st of the next month?

Apple pulls “fast” iPhone ad

Apple’s iPhone ad touting how fast the iPhone is has been pulled from distribution apparently after a warning from the UK Advertising Standards Authority. It showed an iPhone completing browsing tasks in 29 seconds that took UK’s PC Pro magazine 2 minutes and 21 seconds to replicate.

I note also that most Apple iPhone demos I’ve seen seem to have edited out the need to log into your account on the App store before purchasing anything.

dscacheutil is command of the day

Having recently changed ISP, my command of the day is


dscacheutil -flushcache

which flushes your machine’s DNS cache to allow you to access your named sites via their new IP addresses once you’ve changed them in the DNS thus making the locally cached IP addresses stale.

Airport commandline utility

If you need to connect to an airport wireless network from the commandline you could check out the little known airport command line utility.

It’s hidden at
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport

You can use –help for help and -I for signal strength and ID info