Mike Cohen

Daily Pics

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Here are two great pictures I took today that I’d like to share.

A Perfect Gardenia

My neighbor’s gardenia is blooming and it happened to have one perfect flower.

Hemingway Cat

This 6-toed cat has been hanging around my house. I managed to get a good closeup of his paw.

iPhone SDK restrictions

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I finally downloaded the iPhone SDK and I’ve been exploring it all day. However, the license has some serious restrictions which may affect our ability to develop our product for the iPhone. In particular:

3.3.1 Applications may only use Published APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any unpublished or private APIs.

3.3.2 An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s).

It also appears that we won’t be able to develop an invisible background application without violating the license.

The Naysayers were wrong

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Last week, Engadget and others were predicting that the iPhone SDK would be seriously limited and even suggested continuing to jailbreak the iPhone rather than use the SDK:

It was only a matter of time till the serious iPhone SDK rumors started flying, and with Apple’s Town Hall event next Thursday, it’s possible some of what we’re hearing is right on. If that’s the case, prepare to be letdown in a major way. According to iLounge, Apple will be severely restricting access on software for the iPhone and iPod touch, only allowing apps to be downloaded through iTunes, hand-picking which applications will make it to the store, and cutting off developer’s access to accessories which interface with the dock connector. Of course, this is just about what we expected from Steve, since he’s already lauded Nokia for its S60 verification scheme. Additionally, the report claims that the SDK we see next week will be an incomplete beta, with the full version rolling out in June to coincide with the WWDC. Thinking of any good reasons to keep jailbreaking your phone? Yeah, us too.

As I predicted, they were wrong. Apple’s SDK gives even more capabilities than the hacked unofficial toolchain. Today, Engadget called the new SDK a winner.

I’m still trying to download the SDK now. Apple’s servers are being hit very hard and were very slow for most for most of the day. To make matters worse, my DSL connection drops after less than 5 minutes due to the heavy storms we’re having now, so I’ve had to continuously resume the transfer. After reconnecting numerous times, the transfer failed at about 1.2 GB. As I write this, the restarted transfer is now at 622 MB with 41 minutes remaining.

Is Karl Rove working for Hillary Clinton?

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Hillary Clinton seems to be running her campaign right out of Karl Rove’s playbook. She’s obsessed at winning at any cost with no regard to how much damage she does to the party and the country. Her tactics pretty much guarantee a Republican win in November when she can praise McCain while attacking Obama:

In a live CNN interview just now, Sen. Clinton repeated, twice, the “Sen. McCain has a lifetime of experience, I have a lifetime of experience, Sen. Obama has one speech in 2002” line. By what logic, exactly, does a member of the Democratic party include the “Sen. McCain has a lifetime of experience” part of that sentence? (via Washington Monthly)

She’s now doing the Republicans job for them. Every poll has shown that she would lose against McCain while Obama would beat him. The Republicans have already chosen their candidate while the Democrats are still fighting. The longer this drags out, the less chance of a Democratic victory in November. If anything, Clinton is the one candidate who can unite the Republicans to insure a win for McCain.

Don't ever do this

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I’m debugging a piece of code (which I didn’t write) that acts as a specialized web server when I found a little gem (more like a turd). When a system call fails, it simply calls exit(0) to quit immediately with no error message and no attempt to recover. Argggh!

Death and taxes

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I got my taxes taken care of today by two wonderful ladies in Pompano Beach who do an amazing job. They’ve been doing my taxes for the last three years.

This year I also had to have them do my late mother’s taxes from 2005, the year she died, for which I ended up having to pay over $500. I wasn’t able to find receipts or bills for her medical expenses, so they couldn’t be claimed, which would most likely have meant not having to pay anything.

Looking at my mother’s paperwork brought back memories of her final few months, which she spent mostly in the hospital. Since this morning I’ve been thinking of her and feeling depressed. I wish I didn’t have to remember her that way, dying of lung cancer, which is really a horrible way to go.

New Nine Inch Nails album available for download

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Nine Inch Nails has joined the growing list of artists who are distributing their music by alternate methods, without the benefit of a label or distributor.

Trent Reznor explains:

“I’ve been considering and wanting to make this kind of record for years, but by its very nature it wouldn’t have made sense until this point. This collection of music is the result of working from a very visual perspective – dressing imagined locations and scenarios with sound and texture; a soundtrack for daydreams. I’m very pleased with the result and the ability to present it directly to you without interference. I hope you enjoy the first four volumes of Ghosts.”

Although I’m not a particularly big NIN fan, I’m a strong supporter of any artist that self-distributes their music, so I purchased their $5 download. This is the future of music. Any artist who says “F* you” to their record label and sells their music directly deserves our support. As more artists take the initiative, the big record labels will go out of business, yet there will be more and better music available and artists will make more money by eliminating the middleman.

Unfortunately, the purchase didn’t go smoothly. Their servers are getting hit very hard, so it took several tries before I was able to get a confirmation page and my download link (thankfully PayPal was charged only once). When I actually tried to download it, every attempt timed out and failed in less than a minute. Finally, I got the “download limit exceeded” error. As it stands, I’m now waiting to hear from support@store.nin.com to resolve the issue.

What artists can learn from this is that their servers better be prepared for unexpected amounts of download traffic. A single server most likely wouldn’t be able to handle the demand. Instead, they should use a content delivery network such as Akamai or a high availability server such as Amazon’s S3 rather than hosting it on their regular server.