It’s a nice way of ensuring that nobody will read what’s on your screen or does stupid things using your Facebook or XMPP accounts—at the office as well as at home or on the road. A few years ago, before the iPhone, I remember I used something called “BluePhone Elite” to do the same.

Unfortunately the shortcomings of this method remain the same: While these tools always know when your phone is not found via Bluetooth and lock your screen accordingly, every now and then the lookup fails and you’re facing a locked screen after sitting down (which requires that you enter your password to disable the tool temporarily—it re-enables automatically a few seconds later, as soon as it found your phone).

I’ll keep using Airlock for now—let’s see whether it behaves. If it bugs me too much, I’ll have to make a decision against security. That’s not desirable.

Some call it a big brother to iPod touch and iPhone—the smartphone we ♥ so much. Taptivate, an iPhone development house, feels the need to re-define Rev⋅o⋅lu⋅tion (noun), but didn’t justify their claim yet.

Many techies knowing my deep appreciation for anything Apple approached me with laughter about that tablet PC—HP already sold similar PCs no-one wanted seven years ago. Yes, there’s nothing magical about the hardware, folks.

The iPad will sell like there’s no tomorrow. Not especially to the groups called innovators or early adopters though. The iPad will sell to people who don’t want to know about hard- and software and the inner workings of a computer, as long as it leaves them alone.

Your mom will get an iPad.

This is a bold move, I know. But iPad’s possibilities were already known to her shortly after the Apple guys stood on stage. Tired of having to fight spyware, Windows security warnings and updating anti-virus software, she’ll love to shell out 500 bucks to get this device which just lets her do what she needs to do: Internet, email, calendar, reading ebooks and consuming electronic media. And thanks to iPhones and iPod touches she’s already familiar with how to use the iPad.

But it’s not only the techies. The industry’s reaction to the iPad is nothing less than future shock—as coined by Fraser Speirs. This is the beginning of a new era of personal computing.

And to all the disappointed geeks whining about the hardware and Apple’s closed software environment:

It is focused, elegant, and simple. It’s philosophy is centered around humans, not technology. It challenges us to rethink our assumptions of what it means to use a computer and what it takes to be productive with them. → Is the iPad for Dumb People?

Seriously, think about it. I love my Macs because I don’t need to care about them and can just be productive.

Will I try the iPad? You Betcha.

So, without further ado, here’s what it allows you to do:

Share your reading experience by writing notes, tracking progress, and meeting fellow readers.

I’m using it to keep track of my reading progress with almost every book I read (Readernaut unfortunately does not work with books not available on Amazon) and to catch a glimpse at what others are reading around me.

You have access to my profile at http://readernaut.com/schrader/ and find out that I’m currently reading David Allen’s “Making It All Work”—a successor of “Getting Things Done”, of which you’ll know by reading my blog, I’m a fan.

Share what you’re reading and follow me

Then it occurred to me once again: All the different cars I drive on a regular basis are able to display their current fuel consumption on a display on the dashboard. But this data doesn’t just show up there every time you start the engine, to see it you actually have to shuffle through a menu of other items.

I’d like to have the fuel consumption displayed on the dashboard by default—instead of information like the name of the playing radio station, which is redundant anyways.

Since this would make the drivers amongst us more aware of their use of fuel, I think it could ultimately lead to more responsible driving and less fuel consumed.

So let’s not call this a New Year’s pledge: I just joined “Project 52”, which basically is a personal challenge to write more.

The goal is to write at least 1 new article per week for 1 year. Because we all know what it‘s like to procrastinate on our content. A website is not just a fresh design that can be uploaded to the web and forgotten about!

And since the “fresh design” is also something this blog unfortunately still lacks, I have a second goal to work towards.

This year, I want to a) make blogging a habit again, and b) take the time to make this blog reflect more of what I can do visually on the web and not just some ready-made template thrown on a server somewhere.

Join the ride yourself!

If you want to join in on the fun, just head over to http://project52.info/ and sign up, there’s still some time to do so. And if you’re using Twitter, make sure to follow @project52 as well.

Gowalla makes checking in everywhere and sharing places fun. It motivates its users by rewarding them with stamps on their passports and items in their packs—it transforms everyday activities into a kind of scavenger hunt, not quite like geocaching, but it’s an interactive social game you can play everywhere you go.

I used it for one day now and I really like it. Check it out and visit my profile!

Oh, and for those of you speaking or rather understanding German: Lest euch unbedingt Martins Einführung zu Gowalla im Blog auf Labuschin Webdesign durch!

About a week ago, I removed my Apple Refurb Western Digital 500GB HD (5400rpm) from the Mac Pro and replaced it with a striped array of two Samsung 1TB disks, each with 7200rpm.

The HD has been the bottleneck with my machine, it just had to be faster—so I didn’t really benchmark it. I have stopped the time for boot and shutdown though (auto-login enabled, some tools auto-starting):

WD 500GB 5400rpm:
Up: 2:17m (43s) — Down: 22s

Samsung 1TB 7200rpm 2× (RAID 0):
Up: 0:44m (35s) — Down: 27s

Seconds in brackets are boot time until Finder first shows, longer times are time until Google Quick Search Box shows (which means that all auto-starting applications are loaded).

This is by all means not scientifically measured, but it sufficiently shows the increase in speed while booting the machine and opening up applications—shutting down on the other hand takes 5 seconds longer than before (anyone knows why? Please share in the comments!).

And, after a week, I can say everything feels way snappier

I finally got around to reading it this afternoon—its result: I e-mailed three of my lecturers concerning their statements to related topics.

“JavaScript is a subset of Java.”

This is what one of our professors told us the whole last semester. I knew it was plain wrong, but I kept my mouth shut—I didn’t want to be the guy who knows everything better (we already had some discussions about encodings etc. after class).

But stumbling over said topic again in aforementioned comic, I finally had to “raise my hand” and speak up—this snippet caused the first e-mail:

The second e-mail was caused by the following snippet (edited by me to shorten the sequence):

When I went to another Professor after his lecture to ask him why we had to use XHTML 1.1 for our assignments though he didn’t tell us to use the correct MIME type (application/xhtml+xml), he told me we could live without this information being correct since this was a lecture aimed at beginners. In my opinion, this is no excuse—he could just demand XHTML 1.0 and everything was fine automatically.

The third mail was the shortest one: I mailed another lecturer about this comic to make him aware of it.

I learned something very important once again tonight: Talk to people. Especially if (you think) you know something better.

I’m part of the German WaSP Interact team and a proud Webkraut. And I take our mission’s goals more seriously than ever.

Shawn included my Mac setup in a sweet series of desks with Apple computers on them.

Thanks Shawn!

All others, go to Shawn’s blog and subscribe to his RSS feed. He’s writing great reviews over there, you sure don’t want to miss out on this! Oh, and follow @shawnblanc on Twitter for some great insights (Shawn is a Birdhouse user).

Update: I included a short video of my workspace in the garden below to add to above’s workspace in the home office.

I regularly browse iTunes, to check out the latest songs. I’m an active window shopper in the music section.

But my general process of discovery in terms of new apps for my iPhone doesn’t look like “Open AppStore, search for something, check descriptions, buy an application”—I find apps on the net. When I’m working at my desk. Or maybe tweeps recommend apps on Twitter and I find them interesting. 

What do you think? Did Apple intend to build a platform where customers browse a catalog to find new apps? What is your typical way to find new apps?

I had already planned to purchase LittleSnapper a while ago—it’s 39$ on its own, so by purchasing the MacHeist3 Bundle for 37$ (2$ off for community members) I got it actually cheaper and with a lot of additional value. That said, I’m eager to try out PhoneView (manages iPhone’s data on the Mac) and Espresso (a code editor for web workers)—and iSale will probably come in pretty handy for some stuff I have planned for the next time.

Fail!

While my first purchase two days ago failed for unknown reasons (I got a purchase confirmation from PayPal, but nothing from MacHeist, the latter also displayed nothing but a blank page upon returning from PayPal), I happily got my copies of the apps this morning—after receiving my money back from the first try.

The real fail

Okay, MacHeist messed up my first order. But after asking for help and describing the problem, why do you tell me that

Receipts have been going out slower than expected due to the high volume of activity on the server. You should receive a bundle receipt within 24 hours. Please make sure to check your junk mail folder to see if it was routed there.

…only to transfer the money back half an hour later without notice? Come on, admit that something went wrong, tell me about it and instruct me to repeat the purchase if necessary. But don’t send me a canned response which has nothing to do with the problem or what you’re doing.

Just my 2 Cents.

Now go and get your MacHeist 3 Bundle—25% of each purchase go to charity.

Update: This feels weird as well:

Command line work. DRY?

Capistrano took over, which made the whole process a lot easier. Deploying now meant to type capd in a Terminal window, TextExpander made cap deploy out of it and the capistrano script took care for all the stuff mentioned above.

Nowadays my SVN repositories are hosted on Beanstalk instead of my own server. So after committing my changes I simply go to the project’s Beanstalk page and press a button: Deploy. Done.

Thanks to my Passenger setup, Beanstalk can just upload my new files to the server via FTP—and that’s all there is to do.

And again, thanks to Passenger, it’s almost as easy as that to install a new app: Just configure your Apache to serve the public/ folder of your Rails app and Passenger takes care of the rest. Easy as pie.

A word of caution though: Depending on your server’s power you may want to decrease the maximum amount of running passenger instances—the default is set up to 6, in which case Rails may eat your RAM for lunch (if you’re on a tiny box like I am).

To do this, edit your httpd.conf and add the following line:

PassengerMaxPoolSize 2

A post on this topic which helped me a lot is Phusion Passenger (mod_rails) Memory Management.

A few months ago, I’ve been working on a project in a different area than what I normally do. Together with two other guys we localised Clearleft’s usability testing software Silverback and created a German version.

Thanks to the detailed instructions Andy sent us the project didn’t take too much time actually working (though it did stretch out over a long period of time) and it was fun!

Below are some more pictures from the nice goodies pack I’ve received a week ago—thanks, @Clearleft!

First of all, you’ll need to use the mysqldump command to dump your database into a file:

mysqldump -u [dbuser] -p -h [database.host.com] -​-opt [dbname] > db_dump.sql

After filling in your values for dbuser, your database host and your database’s name, mysqldump will prompt you for the database user’s password—enter it and you’re almost done exporting your data.

Assuming you have shell access to both servers involved, you can use scp to copy the dump file over to the new machine easily and securely:

scp db_dump.sql sshuser@newhost.com:/directory/on/the/new/server/db_dump.sql

With the database dump file copied over, all there’s left to do is to fill it into the new database! Since the dump file consists of SQL queries, we’ll do the last step like this:

mysql -u [dbuser] -D [dbname] -p < db_dump.sql

That’s it—the user and database names you enter in this step will probably differ from the ones in step #1, but all in all, that’s how you move a MySQL database.

A word of caution though: If you want to move a database for a webproject which requires a lot of user interaction with the database, you’ll want to look for other methods or put your webapp in maintenance mode during the switch—you don’t want your users to lose data they enter on the old server after you dumped the database.

I found out that MySQL didn’t listen for anything other than localhost calls—to change that, I had to do these steps:

$ nano /etc/mysql/my.cnf

Edit the MySQL configuration file on your server (I’m using nano for editing) and go to the following line:

bind-address = 127.0.0.1

The IP address 127.0.0.1 means your MySQL is only listening for anything localhost. Change it to the IP of your server, press CTRL + O to save and CTRL + X to exit from nano.

Now all you need to do to make MySQL pick up the new settings is execute the following line:

$ /etc/init.d/mysql restart
Stopping MySQL database server: mysqld.
Starting MySQL database server: mysqld.
Checking for corrupt, not cleanly closed and upgrade needing tables..

You should be able to access your databases from other machines now. If you don’t need to do this or don’t need it anymore, change the IP back to 127.0.0.1 to make things more secure.

Though it should work, don’t use this method to move databases—you don’t need to download and dump your data to your local machine before uploading it to the a new server again. I wrote another post on how to move MySQL databases with the mysqldump command.