The Well Tempered Hacker: Supermicro AMD Hardware with Xen Linux Virtual Machines

I'm starting a little screencast show called "The Well Tempered Hacker" in which I take a look at some of the technologies I've been using. I had been writing about HOW you do some of these things on this website, but sometimes it makes more sense to get some context surrounding WHY you would want to do some of these things. I figured the best way to do this was to give examples from real-world situations and hence came The Well Tempered Hacker.

In this episode, we look at a dual AMD Supermicro machine with 32 Gigs of RAM and 9 hard drives from NewEgg.com. We create a RAID5 volume in software with 8 1TB drives and use LVM to slice that into logical volumes for xen virtual machines. We also take a look at the remote management capabilities of the system and see how you would rarely need to be near this machine to manage it!





Please let me know what you think of the show. comments...

iPad to Support Phone Calls?

I ran across an interesting setting in the iPad Simulator in the new Apple SDK which lets you toggle the In-Call Status Bar. This hints at a voice capability eventually available in the iPad.

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Of A4 Chips and iPads

The most important thing about the iPad announcement is that Apple is making their own silicon. It is amazing that Apple can both get a chip out the door and keep the price of the iPad down at the same time. I suspect that what is driving the decision to acquire and go inside the company for a chipset is the need to combine a CPU and a GPU on the same silicon. You save all sorts of power and gain significant bandwidth between the two when you build them on one chip. I think Apple's needs were getting just a little bit ahead of what the silicon industry had to offer. Said another way, the silicon industry is effectively unaware of what the mobile device industry is demanding these days. comments...

iBooks Search on the iTunes Store

I doubt this will last, but while watching Steve Jobs' iPad keynote today, I did a search for iBooks on the Store and didn't get a result, although I did get a suggestion...



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YouTube Enables HTML5 Flash Replacement

Pretty much the only reason for Flash, in my humble opinion, is ubiquitous video support on the web. However, YouTube took a major step forward today by allowing you to try HTML5 instead via their opt-in beta program. If you have an HTML5 compliant browser such as Safari or Chrome, give it a try. On the Mac, it uses about a tenth of the CPU and never skips a frame - a far cry from Flash video! comments...

The iPhone vs. Nexus One / Android

I've had an iPhone for years and a Google's Nexus One phone for less than a week so therefore I'm qualified to make the obvious comparison it seems everyone is so eagerly requesting. The Nexus One is really nice but it is no iPhone. Rather than anything major, the reason the iPhone wins this round is the litany of details Apple got right. If "overall cohesiveness" were a measurable quantity, the checks would fall disproportionally in the iPhone's column.

Now I could spend several hours nitpicking but if that isn't already obvious to you, I won't convince you. Instead, I'll mention two major obstacles Google has to overcome with Android if they want to close the gap while retaining control.

1. A completely open codebase invites fragmentation. While this might be the golden ticket for some as yet undiscovered shop launching an impeccably designed phone, it isn't a recipe for Google to keep it's lunch. Maybe this isn't Google's overall intent, but a Google designed phone telegraphs "entire ecosystem" which implies the need to retain control at least somewhere.

2. Fraud in the marketplace is disastrous. Maybe Apple's App Store approval process was a good idea after all. Loss of consumer trust is nearly unrecoverable and my sense is we are just seeing the beginning of this. If not the overtly fraudulent bank app, imagine a developer surreptitiously keeping tabs on you via a background app that spies on you via the camera or microphone at will.

What competitors need to do is make a phone that consumers didn't know they wanted, not try to best the iPhone on the playing field Apple outlined. At the moment, Palm seems to be the only company really cutting new ground outside of Apple's solar system. Its possible Android was initially headed in this direction as well but they stopped short of settling enough of the details.

Instead, Google could position Android as more than just a phone OS. Spearhead it as an in-car entertainment system for example, or the central controller to a home automation solution. I haven't seen many an industry that is crying for an Apple style makeover more than these two markets, and a move here by Google would own the landscape.

So in conclusion, I love my Nexus One. Its open and the hardware is a step above the iPhone in most cases. (notable exception is the speaker) But Android lacks an overwhelming attention to detail. Unless Google sees this as a problem, Android will remain second fiddle. And that vote, my dear friends, is still out. comments...

Remote Control Helicopter Piloted via iPhone

I fly helicopters and write iPhone applications so if there was ever something straight down my alley, it has got to be this:



When you fly an RC helicopter, one of the hardest things to learn is how to control a helicopter that is facing towards you. As it happens, you have to swap all the controls around in your head. When the helicopter is facing away from you, all the controls act pretty much like they do when you are flying a real helicopter. If you want to go forward, you push the control forward, or away from you. But if an RC helicopter is facing towards you, pushing the control forward makes the helicopter come at you.

Now your standard .60 sized gas powered helicopter can do roughly 70 miles per hour and probably cut your arm off if it hits you. Given that your natural reaction to this killing machine flying in your direction might be to push the control away from you, you would probably be surprised when the helicopter flies towards you even faster! It is counterintuitive to think that you would pull the control towards you to stop the helicopter from hitting you.

The solution to this problem has always been to put a little camera and a radio transmitter on the helicopter and fly it by looking from the point of view of the helicopter. No matter how turned around the helicopter is in real life, you are always looking from the point of view of the pilot and therefore you never have to turn things around in your head.

To date, these solutions have been very expensive. However, with the Parrot AR Drone, you leverage the radio and video display already existing in your iPhone. All that is needed is a helicopter camera that works over WiFi. There is no reason why this idea wouldn't work on any RC helicopter (or car / boat / train / what have you, for that matter) but the helicopter is probably the most visually compelling idea. Actually, I could also see an underwater camera for the RC Submarine market being compelling as well, but I don't have one of those! comments...

iTunes Best New Podcasts - Norman Centuries

Apple is listing our new Norman Centuries podcast under their "Best New Podcasts: Audio" section on iTunes.



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Lars Brownworth's Smithsonian Lecture

Lars Brownworth's December 2, 2009 lecture on Byzantine history given at the Smithsonian in Washington DC is now available on YouTube. This lecture was part of the Smithsonian's Resident Associates Program. You will notice that the video gave out for the question and answer period but audio is still available.

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iPhone StoreKit - Getting Started with In-App Purchasing

While the fact that StoreKit is not supported in the iPhone Simulator is fairly common knowledge, I wish I knew these two things when starting up with StoreKit programming on the iPhone.

1. In iTunes Connect, you won't see the "Manage In-App Purchases" option until you create a product in iTunes Connect. You need to be able to select an application before you can create products in "Manage In-App Purchases". Create an application and "upload an application bundle later" to get around the requirement. Once you have an application defined, you'll get "Manage In-App Purchases" in the main iTunes Connect menu.

2. In-App Purchasing test users can never be used on the iPhone outside your app. In other words, in the Settings application, log your App Store user out (under "App Store" in Settings) and NEVER log in there as your test user. The reason is, a sandbox user will skip the "enter credit card info" step and just run test purchases directly through your app without involving the system's management of the App Store user. If the iPhone tries to send you to some other application (such as the App Store application) to confirm changes of some sort or another, that user is hosed. The iPhone won't let you run test purchases for that user. You must create a new test user in iTunes Connect with a different email address. Using Gmail's "+" notation to simulate new email addresses is helpful here. For example, mail sent to user+foo@gmail.com and user+bar@gmail.com will both be forwarded to user@gmail.com so you can make up a virtually unlimited number of email addresses.

Other than that, the Apple documentation for StoreKit should be all you need to get In-App Purchasing going in your iPhone application. comments...