Fred Cirera

Apple and its U.S. wireless partner AT&T are being sued by a customer for not delivering the performance promised. He is saying that the network has been “overloaded” by the number of iPhones sold. Your can read the full article on the SJ mercury news.

This is interesting because if the consumer group wins the lawsuit, other class action lawsuits could be filed against companies like Sprint, AT&T, and Comcast for not delivering the service and bandwidth they have advertised.

The good and the bad coming from the new web browser from Google.

According to this quote from Reuters.

“We have borrowed good ideas from others,” Google Vice President of Product Management Sindar Pichai said. “Our goal here was to bring our point of view, but do it in a very open way.”

Because Chrome relies on Apple’s open-source WebKit software for rendering Web pages, it can run any application that runs on Apple’s Safari Web browser, Pichai said.

“If you are a Webmaster, and your site works in Apple Safari then it will work very well in Google Chrome,” he said.

All this means is that there is no technology breakthrough in Chrome. The rendering engine is based on WebKit which is itself based on KDE‘s Konquerer. The only thing Google Chrome does differently is one process per tab. The overhead should be more important than in an all multi-threaded program. For people who open a lots of tabs Chrome will need more memory to run than Firefox for example.

With the high visibility of Google, the number of users running a WebKit browser will increase. This will force developers to test their sites not only with IE and Firefox but also with a WebKit-based browser. Ultimately, developers will prefer standard HTML and Javascript over the specificity of a browser over an another. If they don’t want to lose significant traffic, they will need to stick to standards. Standards are good for users, Apple, Linux, and Opera.

There is one thing I have doubts about. Google doesn’t seems to care much about your privacy¹. (Ok they claim they do). Their goal is to collect a maximum of information about you, to show you more targeted ads. Some may think it is good but, with the search engine, adsense, checkout, doubleclick, and now the browser, Google is collecting a lot of information about user behavior. I really hope for us that they will not use all this information for evil.

¹ Why does Google remember information about searches?, Google Toolbar Privacy Notice

The Google PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important your page is on the web. It is based on the number and quality of "backlinks" a webpage has. A high PageRank indicates that the page must be important since many sites are linking to it.

On MacOS and on Unix the default editor is in general vi[1] (/usr/bin/vi). This means that when you want to call an editor from an application, vi will be called by default.

For example, suppose you are looking at a file with the command less and you want to edit the file you are looking at. Just press the key v. Less will call the default editor, allowing you to change the content of the file you are looking at.

The cool thing about the mini Zonbu machine is that they have good CPU, a lot of memory and they have a low power consumption. OpenBSD make them a very good candidate to be a nice little secure network appliance. For the past few weeks I have been using mine as home router / firewall / DNS server with anti ad / NTP server.

I am running two NTP servers for the project pool.ntp.org, one located in France, the second here in California. I am monitoring my servers with Munin. Munin comes with plenty of plugins to monitor the temperature of your computer, your disks, your CPU, etc, etc. It also comes with plugins to monitor your NTP daemon, but there is no plugin to monitor how much your NTP server is used. Since I am running open servers I was interested in finding out how much my servers where used.

This past weekend I was at the Santa Clara County Model Aircraft Skypark SCCMAS for the 2008 Airshow.

Yesterday evening, I was at the Firefox 3 launch party or as I call it a geek gathering.

Actually it was nice. There was some good BBQ, the “awesome bar” with a professional bartender making cocktails. And a lot of nice people from the community.

Also congratulations to the Firefox team for achieving more than 8 million downloads in 24 hours.

Apple has just released a new configuration guide to help the the users of MacOS to secure their operating system. This manual is available for MacOS desktop and server edition as well as for Leopard (10.5), Tiger (10.4), and Panther (10.3).

This guide has more than two hundred pages describing the MacOS X architecture, secure installtion, information on patching, protecting and securing the peripherals, securing user account, backups, certificates, vpn configuration, etc. This is a very thorough manual.

This manual is intended for IT, and specialists. Users can browse through it to find interesting information and increase their security awerness.

Download your Mac OS X Security Configuration Guides

Next week Steve Jobs will announce the new Apple products at the WWDC. One of the most expected new product is new iPhone with GPS and 3G as well as the new version of the iPhone OS version 2.

If we believe the rumors the new iPhone is ready for shipping. And right after Steve announcement you will be able download the new version of the OS and upgrade your iPhone.

Here is the list of the new features that should be available.

• smaller (thinner) and lighter
• available in new colors
• video recording
• video conferencing
• GPS
• faster network connection with 3G
• ActiveSync, allowing the iPhone to be compatible with Microsoft Exchange
• Cicso VPM
• Scientific calculator

New low end models with a price around $200 should be announced as well.