Gruber over at Daring Fireball posted a great writeup on the Gizmodo iPhone debacle. It’s a great read: Daring Fireball: Gizmodo and the Prototype iPhone.
Why Apple Could Sue Gawker Over Lost iPhone Story – DailyFinance
More discussion about Gizmodo’s potential problems related to their “good fortune” of stumbling upon an iPhone prototype…
Finders Keepers?
What he never did, however, was notify anyone who worked at the bar, according to its owner, Volcker Staudt. That would have been the simplest way to get the phone back to the Apple employee who lost it, who “called constantly trying to retrieve it” in the days afterward, recalls Volcker. “The guy was pretty hectic about it.”
Nor did the finder report it to the Redwood City Police Department, says Sgt. Dan Mulholland. To be fair, no one from Apple told the police the phone was lost, either. I contacted a company spokeswoman to ask why not but never heard back.
Assuming the jury in a hypothetical criminal or civil suit consisted of locals like Volcker, the claim that the sellers actions constituted a “reasonable effort” to contact the owner wouldnt hold much water. “The most reasonable effort would have been to bring it back to us, because he knows that person would be going back to us first,” says Volcker. “Why not just make it simple and bring it back?”
Buyers Burden
And make no mistake: In this case, it was up to Gawker to establish that the seller legally possessed the property. Paul J. Wallin, a founding partner at the California law firm Wallin & Klaritch, offers an analogy. “If you purchase a Rolex watch at a swap meet for $200, a reasonable person would be put on notice that it might be stolen goods,” he says. The buyer would thus be required to take extra measures to determine that it wasnt.
via Why Apple Could Sue Gawker Over Lost iPhone Story – DailyFinance.
Posted in Uncategorized.
For sale, Gizmodo’s integrity… Cheap!
The scoop of a lifetime occurred for Gizmodo recently when, through intense research and journalistic savvy they managed to uncover the highly anticipated iPhone — months before it’s release. It would be a great day for Gizmodo were that the case, but in fact it’s not. Gizmodo Forrest Gumped their way into possession of the top-secret device by being willing to pay $5,000 for stolen property.
The top headlines on their site right now read like the front page of a supermarket tabloid:
- How Apple lost the next iPhone!
- How Apple missed chances to get the device back
- Why Apple didn’t leak the iPhone to us
- And finally, how Apple asked to get their phone back
- How we put the phone in an envelope and sent it to them
Okay, I made the last one up, but it isn’t too much of a departure from those that it followed.
Posted in Miscellaneous.
stonemind consulting » Small Django tips from one newbie to another
Was looking for a quick and easy way to deal with refreshing my db schema in Django. A bit of googling turned up
stonemind consulting » Small Django tips from one newbie to another.
Worth bookmarking as it solved that problem for me, and has a lot of other useful tips and scripts.
Posted in Miscellaneous.
Installing MySQL from source on OS X
While MAMP has proven to be very convenient for doing local development, not having the MySQL header files around sometimes causes difficulty when it comes time to install/compile something that needs those header files to be in place.
Getting Ready
I always set up a src directory under my user account for these installations.
> cd ~
> mkdir src
> cd src
Download MySQL Community Edition
At the time of this writing, it could be found at http://mysql.mirrors.hoobly.com/Downloads/MySQL-5.1/mysql-5.1.45.tar.gz
Download this file into your src directory.
> curl -O http://mysql.mirrors.hoobly.com/Downloads/MySQL-5.1/mysql-5.1.45.tar.gz
Untar, configure, and install
> tar -xvzf mysql-5.1.45.tar.gz
> cd mysql-5.1.45
> ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/mysql --with-extra-charsets=complex \
--enable-thread-safe-client --enable-local-infile --enable-shared \
--with-plugins=innobase
> make
> sudo make install
> cd /usr/local/mysql
> sudo ./bin/mysql_install_db --user=mysql
> sudo chown -R mysql ./var
> cd ..
MAMP specific issue
Given that I had installed MAMP previously, I had modified my /etc/my.cnf to specify that the mysql.sock was located in /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock. I modified this line to point to /usr/local/mysql/var/mysql.sock, and then set the sticky bit on the var directory.
> chmod 1777 /usr/local/mysql/var
There are other steps that can be added so that mysqld launches on startup, but I prefer to start it manually when it is needed.
Posted in Host, Infrastructure.
Dealing with a trojan virus on dreamhost
I host a lot of simple sites on Dreamhost. Imagine my surprise when I went to log into my control panel and was informed that google had listed one of my sites as being a suspected malware site.
The site that it referenced was a very rarely used site, that only housed a custom built app (more of a script than an actual app) so I was puzzled as to how this site could have become infected.
I logged into the host, and did a quick check of the directory structure, and immediately noticed some suspicious things. Continued…
Posted in Host, Infrastructure.
Fun with the Flex component loading order
I have a Flex component that I have written that consists of a tabbed navigator that houses several panels, each panel housing a Flex datagrid. An action in another component triggers an url to load and populate these datagrids. The problem that I encountered was that if the datagrid had not yet been viewed, then the datagrid would not be created yet, and as such, the event listener that populates the datagrid was never fired.
The solution for this was actually quite simple. Continued…
Posted in Client.
Installing django with MySQL on OS X
I am experimenting with the django web-framework for a few projects at work. I do the majority of my work in PHP or Java, but occasionally I like to play with Ruby on Rails, and decided that django deserved to have a look as well.
The first step in this process is to get django and the various components installed.
- Python
- EasyTools
- MySql
- MySqlDB
- Django
Posted in Host, Infrastructure.
But checking in takes so looooong
Jim Gaffigan has a bit where he observes that fast-food ordering has been reduced to shouting out a number “yeah, give me a number TWO” and he goes on to theorize that soon we’ll be reduced to grunts. That’s the direction we are headed with the new craze for “location-based” applications and services.
Hailed by technology evangelists, and feared by privacy advocates, location based social networking apps are popping up on Facebook and Twitter faster than weeds in my front yard. The apps themselves don’t offend me, they seem to be reasonably attractive, and Lord knows there are enough of them to choose from (loopt, foursquare, check.in, etc.) I’m not even that worried about the privacy aspect (http://robmenow.com/) What concerns (depresses) me more is the continuing devolution of communication. The trend toward grunting is depressing:
- Writing letters to a friend “Dear Madam,—I have been shown in the files of the War…”
- Sending instant messages to your friend “Josh: You going to the game tonight?”
- Tweeting (or status updating) “I hate Mondays, but I had a great weekend”
- Checking-in “I’m here”
- Tweeting (or status updating) “I hate Mondays, but I had a great weekend”
- Sending instant messages to your friend “Josh: You going to the game tonight?”
It’s difficult to imagine this devolving any further, as we have now reduced communication from the written word to simply pushing a button that tells people your geographic location. “I’m here” ”now I’m here” ”now I’m somewhere else” Continued…
Posted in Trends.
A Day Without Shoes
A day without shoes
This isn’t related to technology or productivity, but it’s something to help the heart feel good. Tomorrow I will be participating in One Day Without Shoes. This is, as you could have guessed, being done by Tom’s Shoes, a remarkable shoe company that gives away one pair of shoes to a child in need for every pair that they sell. They operate as a non-profit, and are a very easy company to support.
From the site…
- In some developing nations, children must walk for miles to school, clean water and to seek medical help.
- Cuts and sores on feet can lead to serious infection.
- Often, children cannot attend school barefoot.
- In Ethiopia, approximately one million people are suffering from Podoconiosis, a debilitating and disfiguring disease caused by walking barefoot in volcanic soil.
- Podoconiosis is 100% preventable with basic foot hygiene and wearing shoes.
I encourage any of you who can to consider going without shoes tomorrow to help spread awareness about this cause.
Posted in Miscellaneous.
