Disclaimer: The method described below almost certainly violates Hulu’s Terms of Use. I do not know the legal ramifications of breaking these TOU. I am not suggesting that you actually follow my fictional instructions.

PING google.com (74.125.95.104): 56 data bytes

sudo ipfw add 0 deny tcp from any to any 1935
sudo ipfw add 0 deny udp from any to any 1935

iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 1935 -j DROP
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p udp --dport 1935 -j DROP

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 1935 -j DROP
iptables -A INPUT -p udp --dport 1935 -j DROP

sudo ipfw delete 00100
sudo ipfw delete 00200

sudo ipfw list

00100 deny tcp from any to any dst-port 1935
00200 deny udp from any to any dst-port 1935
65535 allow ip from any to any

Linux: you’re on your on. I think you run the same commands you use to block the ports, instead of “DROP” use “ADD”. But I can’t guarantee that.

I wanted to deactivate my account for the day in solidarity. When I attempted to do so, I was presented with this error.

ZUCKED! Note that the error does not tell me which application I need to delete or re-assign, it could be multiple applications for all I know. After deleting the 1 offending application, I was still unable to deactivate the account. So much for that.

Quit Facebook Day Links:

• Direct link to Facebook’s “deactivate” page.
• Direct link to DELETE your Facebook account. Note: you must wait 14 days before Facebook will delete your account, if you log in at anytime within those 14 days your account will not be deleted.
• Openbook

Since my original posts on mobile redirection in .htaccess files I’ve gotten some comments and emails asking for step-by-step guidance on exactly how to “install” these rules. I hope this post will answer some of those questions.

Before you continue reading, if you have php installed on your server, you may want to consider Andy Moore’s php based detection solution.

The Basics

First off, some basic requirements. You’ll need:

• Apache/Linux Hosting. Microsoft’s IIS has a completely different method for handling this sort of thing.
• FTP access.
• Apache mod_rewrite enabled. Depending on the type of hosting you have, it may be difficult to determine if you have this module installed and it may be impossible to enable if you don’t. If the steps below simply don’t seem to work, there is a good chance you don’t have mod_rewrite installed. Ask your tech support.
• Mobile site in a subdirectory, eg. www.yourdomain.com/m/. This set of rules I’ve posted will not work with a mobile subdomain.

The Steps

1. Download mobilerules2.1.txt.
2. Open the file in your favorite text editor, replace the 2 instances of “mobiledirectoryhere” (without quotes) with the directory name you are using for your mobile site. Save it.
3. Open FTP client, enable ‘view hidden files’ – files beginning with a dot are hidden on linux. This option is typically buried in a “view” menu or something to that effect. Results may vary.
4. Navigate to your site’s webroot (probably ‘htdocs’ or ‘www’).
5. • If there is already a .htaccess file present in the directory. Download it, open it in your favorite text editor. Copy & paste the contents ofmobilerules2.1.txt into the file. Save it, upload it.
   • If there is no .htaccess file present. Upload mobilerules2.1.txt as is, rename it to .htaccess.
6. Your Done. Test it from a mobile device.

If you have any questions please leave a comment.

Note: This script treats all opera mini, iphone and android the same as other phones and browsers. Leave some comments if you’d like me to address this.

1. Tools-> Options (Firefox -> preferences or ⌘, on OS X)
2. Select the “Content” tab.
3. Click on the “Advanced” button across from “Enable JavaScript”.
4. Uncheck the “Move or resize existing windows” checkbox.

Thanks to reddit user libertao, another one of the many bits of knowledge I’ve learned from comments on reddit.

When you add recipients to the “CC” list you expose all recipients email addresses to everyone else on the list. By doing this you have inadvertently sent your entire client list to all of your clients.

In the future please use BCC.
For more information, see wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_copy#E-mail

The relationship between Comedy Central and Canada’s Comedy Network is the worst example of what can happen when rights owners assert copyright on the internet, based on national borders. If you are not aware – like Hulu, TV.com and others – Comedy Central videos will not play in Canada, but it’s worse. ComedyCentral.com – the entire domain – is unavailable to Canadian IPs! When you try visit it, you are redirected to comedynetwork.ca.

I found a workaround to this buried in a comment thread on reddit. Firefox users only:

For Canadian viewers, if you are using firefox, install the following addon:
http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/967 then:

1) In Firefox, Go to tools->modify headers
2) From the drop down box on the left select add
3) Then enter: “X-Forwarded-For” in the first input box without the quotation marks
4) Enter: “12.13.14.15″ in the second input box without the quotation marks
5) Leave the last input box empty, and save the filter, and enable it

http://imgur.com/Feb4.png

6) Click the ‘Configuration’ tab on the right then proceed to check the ‘always on’ button.

Close the Modify Headers box and it should work.

[orginal post]

Works like a charm!

I’m going to go through a couple of different steps in the process and talk about some of the unexpected problems. I must say though, I was not very impressed. Nothing about the process is very “Apple-like.”

1. Opening The Account
After you’ve paid your $99 developer fee, there are still a number of legal/contractual hoops you need to jump through before you can atually upload an app for approval. As a Canadian developer, there were some additional hoops.

First, I’m not sure if you can actually sell an app without a GST number. I have a registered business, so this would not have been an issue for me.  But because of the way the sales work I would not be surprised if you were required to have a registered business.

Second, when purchases are made through the Canadian iTunes Store, Apple collects GST for you. This is good because it means you don’t have to worry about the accounting. In order for Canada Revenue Agency to allow Apple to do this for you, you need to fill out a specific tax form. By “fill out” I mean, physically. Apple has a PDF download of the doc available. But they require the original. You have to snail mail it! Apple suggests that they’ll process the doc within one week of recieving it.

Third, if/when you get paid, are are paid by Apple USA (in US Funds). When a US company pays an outside employee/contractor/etc those earnings are subject to international income tax treaties. If no treaty is specified, the IRS will compel Apple to withhold 30% of your earnings. For Canadian software developers, the tax treaty specified a 0% withholding. If you do not want Apple to withhold 30% of your earnings, you are required to obtain an “Employer Identification Number” from the IRS.

I put this off for awhile because I assumed it would be painful. To my surprise, getting this number was one of the most pleasant customer service experiences I’ve ever had over the telephone.

Fourth, this is fairly minor. Apple pays you via wire transfers. So you need to dig up some archaic routing numbers. Seemed to be a fairly common question for the CSR I spoke to at my bank. I imagine this could be a little more difficult to dig up if you use a Credit Union or something.

Once you’ve jumped through all these hoops, you’ll have all the information you need to fill out  the 4 or 5 contract and payment related forms in iTunes Connect. Then you wait. After a week of waiting for Apple to accept my forms, I emailed support. They did not respond, but it was magically up and running the next day.

2. App Approval
Getting an app approved is an entirely nebulous process. Once you upload your app, it just sits there in the “pending review” status until it gets approved. There’s no way to get any sort of updates, there is no indication of where you are in the queue. It’s frustrating.

My app took about 2 weeks to be approved.

3. iTunes Connect
iTunes connect is the web interface that you’re forced to use in order to manage everything related to getting an app into iTunes, getting paid, tracking sales, etc. It is easily one of the worst web apps I have ever used. From the looks of it, Apple just took the  mechanism they had in place to allow bands/labels to manage iTunes music sales and hacked in some hooks to allow app uploads. A lot of the terminalogy used seems to refer to album sales.

The interface is clunky. The site is slow. It doesn’t really work properly on an iPhone. The web-based app upload form doesn’t even really work – they encourage you to use a mac app to upload the application bundles (which works like a charm BTW).

I could live with all of these problems if I actually got decent download and sales statistics. But, you can only look at downloads/sales in a GIANT un-readable 2000px-wide table! (Or CSV – which is moderately useful when imported into a spreadsheet). You can’t compare stats, track trends or do anything really useful with the sales data.  The total sales aren’t even really tallied properly – they’re broken up by country, even though you’re paid by region. You can’t see your month-to-date or year-to-date sales. You have to compile and calculate all of this on your own.

Apple should be ashamed of this piece of junk webapp.

4. Payment?
Apple has hidden a really important tidbit of info in their documenation, something that might have discouraged me from selling my app if I had known ahead of time. Apple only cuts you a check if you have sold (the equivalent of) US$250 PER REGION! Long story short, I am probably never going to get paid for my app. The iTunes sales world is divided into 6 regions: USA and the rest of the world, UK, EU, CA, AU, JP. If you sell $240 in the US and $10 in Canada, you don’t get paid!

I can’t speak to the late payment, non-payment issues the internet has been talking about, I haven’t breached that $250 threshold yet.

I can tell that Apple just released my financial statements for March. Now, it’s really not terribly unusual for companies to release these sorts of finiancial statements 1 month behind, but I’d think a fully automated ONLINE store would be able to generate these reports instantly. In addition to the tardiness, the numbers in the finiancial statements are quite a bit lower than the weekly sales stats that iTunes connect was generating in March.

Conclusion

It sucks.

At the end of the day, Apple is not very friendly to their developers. There’s no oversite, no real point of contact with Apple. If you have a problem, there’s not much you can do about it. My suggestion is, don’t even bother trying to sell your app. Release it for free for the love of the game.

About 6 months ago my wife and I decided to cancel our cable and tivo subscriptions in an attempt to save some money. We weren’t quite sure how painful it would be to go without. At the time, we were probably watching 30 -40 hours per week. Which I’m guessing slightly more than the average family in our demographic – but maybe slightly less than the average “geek” household. It’s hard to come up with a good mental estimate, with tivo’s ad skipping ability you can squeeze in an extra 20-25% more TV.

Going into the experiment we were aware that Canada doesn’t really have any viable free or paid online TV watching options; Hulu and most of the content on US network websitess is blocked from Canadian IPs; until very recently iTunes only hand a handful of uninteresting Canadian TV shows available; the 3 major Canadian networks (and their specialty channel subsidiaries) only have tiny low-res video of a select few shows, not really suitable for full screen tv viewing. So, even if we had a media centre PC hooked up to the TV, there would not be a legal option for us.

I pushed to kill cable because I was fairly certain that we would be able to find illegal torrents of most of the shows we watched and would be able to watch them easily xbox 360′s xvid playback functionality. I did not expect it to be as easy as it was. At least 90% of the shows that we watch regularly – everything from House and Battlestar Galatica to Gossip Girl and the obscure (it’s only aired on a handleful of stations nation-wide) Canadian comedy Less Than Kind – were available online within 12 hours, in high definition and on a 10mpbs connection a half an hour show usually downloads in less than half an hour. Our TV watching habits remained virtually unchanged – instead of pulling up a show on Tivo, we’d load up the xbox. Over these 6 months it’s become clear to me that torrenting TV is actually better than cable TV in most ways. Standard digital cable is not HD and regular cable doesn’t air some US TV for weeks or months after it’s original release – you have to pay for to the highest tier (beyond “full cable”) to get channels like HBO-Canada and even then some shows are still unavailable.

Here’s where it gets a little more geeky.
It is totally possible to manage a torrent based xbox 360 media center by sharing a folder on any computer. I wanted to come up with a “better” solution. Both of the computers that Internet Super Mom and I use are laptops, because they’re laptops, they’re often in sleep mode and sometimes they leave the house. So it’s not entirely practical to have torrents continuous downloading and we found it annoying to make sure a laptop was on in order to stream to the xbox. Luckily, I have an under-utilized Debian web development server sitting in our Son‘s closet that is always on.  It has a LAN connection separate from it’s internet connection, so any heavy streaming between computers would not affect it’s outgoing dev related traffic.

I found two apps that made it possible to use this server as a media source for the xbox:
TorrentFlux – a PHP based bittorrent client. It supports remote login and has integrated torrent search across a number of different torrent search engines. That means, I could queue up torrents from my iPhone whenever I remember to watch the latest episode of a show. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support RSS feeds which would make keeping up to date with a season a little easier, but this isn’t a major problem.

GeeXBoX’s uShare – Is a DLNA media server for Linux, AKA it can stream stuff to your xbox. The install was a major headache, don’t ask me for help, my selective memory has erased all of the gory details. Even though it’s in alpha, it’s very stable.

Anyways, we’re back on cable.
The only reason we decided to go back to is because got a great win-back deal: 2 months free, 5 months at $20/mo. We did not re-subscribe to Tivo. It’s hard to say if we’ll stay with cable after the promo period. With the availability of torrents, the subscription is hardly worth more than $20/mo. I feel like standard-definition cable tv is going to take a serious drop in price of the next 2 – 5 years.

The strangest thing about going back to cable is that we seem to be watching less TV than ever. We are probably only actively watching around 10 – 20 hours per week. We still torrent, but because there is always “something on TV,” it seems less important to have a fresh supply of torrents. If we happen to be home while one of “our shows” is on we’ll watch it. Missing a show is not as big of a deal as it used to be – we aren’t quite as likely to torrent it as we would have been before.

That said, there are a few major myths about the operating system that need to be busted.

1. It’s easier to use
For a long time, Macs (even before OS X) had the unfortunate distinction as the “dummy” computer, good for old people and computer illiterates. Because of this sterotype, I had assumed the the user-interface was somehow inherently easier to use. This is absoultely untrue.
Some things are a little easier. Installing apps is a little easier, sometimes, depending on the installer. Systems preferences is a laid out a little better than the Windows control panels, especially Vista’s. Apps integrate with the OS a little better. Spotlight is pretty awesome. But in general, things are just different, no better or worse than Windows.

A number of important apps/features are actually harder to use:

• cmd vs ctrl: The OS X equivalent of the control key – in windows (and gnome for that matter) – is command. ctrl+z in windows, translates to cmd+z in osx. The issue here is keyboard layout. The cmd key is located right next to the spacebar. This makes any shift+cmd combination extremely difficult to pull off.
• Finder Sucks!: Finder is just not a very good way to manipulate files. The main problem is the lack of an “up” button to navigate to the parent directory. Finder has a back button – “back” isn’t always “up.” Finder also has a dropdown which lists all the directories in the path, while this is a more efficient way to go navigate “up” 2 directories or more, it’s less efficient when you want to navigate up 1 directory – 2 clicks to use the dropdown vs. 1 click to use an “up” button.
  Another issue is the accordion directory interface you get in list view – 1 click opens the directory in the current view, 2 clicks opens the directory as your current view.
  The list view itself is also broken. There is no way to organize the list view to match the default windows list view. I.E. Directories at the top, files below, in alphabetical order.
  Don’t even get me started on the “save file” interface.
• Menu Bar: While I think the top of the screen is actually the correct location for things like the clock and other indicators, the menu bar paradigm does not work well with multiple displays. When I open an app on my secondary display I have to go back to the primary display everytime I want to use the app’s menus. Really does not make any sense.
• Dock: It’s kind of useless.
• Alert Boxes: Application alerts (eg. “Are you sure you want to exit”) appear at the top of the app window, as opposed to the center of the screen. This is another minor UI mistake, imho.

2. Security features are not annoying
OS X warns me the first I open a file or run an app I’ve downloaded off the internet (even if i actually downloaded the file in an archive). Enough said.

3. It doesn’t crash
In a week of use I’ve had 2 or 3 (stable) apps crash, the OS froze and needed to be powercycled once. This is not a good start.

UPDATE!:

Setupmac.com has a solution to my issue with the up button.
First, the keyboard shortcut ⌘↑ goes to the “enclosing folder.” I think this alone solves my problem!!
Second, they also have a patch to add an up button to the finder toolbar.
Link