Same product, same vendor, different price?

Today I was trying out the Genius feature of iTunes. It was proposing me a song from YES which I have bought and even somewhere have the vinyl version of. But it was playing an extended version. So I searched for the standard version which was not in my iTunes library. So I searched for it in iTunes Store. And guess what, you can buy it multiple times at different prices. No I'm not talking about the expanded edition. I'm talking about exactly the same song from exactly the same album. Once at Fr. 1.60 and once at Fr. 2.20. Weird.

Now if you look at the two albums:

http://itunes.apple.com/ch/album/city-of-love/id627355?i=627351

http://itunes.apple.com/ch/album/city-of-love/id220159598?i=220159820

You can see that one Album has 9 songs of Fr. 2.20 each but the album all together costs Fr. 13.

And the other album has 9 songs of Fr. 1.60 each but the album all together costs Fr. 14.40 which is exactly the same as 9 x Fr. 1.60

How can the same product from the same shop be sold at two different prices??

The iPad 3G and WiFi hotspots

Imagine you have a brand new iPad 3G and you are running around airports. Gladly there's WiFi everywhere so you don't have to pay expensive 3G roaming data. Your mobile operator even offers you some WiFi minutes included. So you go and put a dedicated data sim card in your iPad 3G which has corresponding WiFi hotspot options included. Sounds great. In theory yes.

Now what happens. You end up on your favorite airport and you log on to the WiFi. Well to authorize yourself to the WiFi you have to key in your mobile number and you receive an SMS as verification code. But wait, where does it end up on your iPad's sim card? According to delivery reports, the SMS gets send, billed and accepted on the iPad but there's no way to see it. Bummer.

Ok then you take out the SIM card, put it temporarly into your iPhone and authorize that way? Ehm, the iPad has microsim's. If you put it into your larger iPhone slot, you risk of loosing it somewhere inside the case and never get it out. Fail.

Ok then you authorize using your iPhone's built-in sim card. Works, but then your iPhone sim card get's charged instead of the one from the iPad which you just added the "big huge data subscription".

In my case, I had to use my iPhone' sim card already for 400MB abroad last month and that's the biggest subscription you can get. So I wanted to have this solved and called Orange Switzerland. And guess what, their techies where able to solve the issue by allocating a fixed password. Bravo for their flexibility!

Airport Security

This morning at the Kevlavik Airport in Icleand:

Take your shoes off, take your belt off, take your jacket off, take your laptop out, take your watch off. So far I have seen all of that before and its annoying. But here they enforce all of it and more!

The next thing they asked is to take all charger and cables out of the laptop bag. Now this is too much. My laptop bag is full of such stuff. It contained 2 iPhones (one for use, one for development), so 3 chargers, USB cables, Ethernet cables, Emergency Boot CD's and USB Sticks, Electronic smart pen, ebanking key, car keys etc. A digital nomade travels with a bag full of electronics these days. So I got upset and to not waste precious time, I put my bag upside down and shaked everything out while already starting to get nasty. I don't think they have seen more that way than if the stuff would have remained in the bag.

And because I got mad at them, they of course had to punish me by doing a hand touch scan even though the body scanner did not beep.

Millions of people are passing through Airport Security every day. Millions get punished and harassed through the security checks. Just because some security guy wants to show off his power doesn't make flying more secure. full body scanners don't make flying more secure but it makes flying a lot more hassle for the millions who travel without bombs and just want to go home or on vacation. Is it really worth it?

Flying is always a risk. Driving to the airport however is the much higher risk. Do you have to do a full body scan before taking the train, riding a bicycle or boarding a cruise ship? Frankly airport security got out of its hands. The security check level compared to the benefit for the community of all the fliers is in heavy misbalance. But why does nobody do anything about it? Politics want to do something to prove they are not useless. So the reaction of a caught bomber is "more security more security". However the result is that normal people get punished, the public takes up the bill and the bad guys find easy ways around it. And the politicians think they did something good. Now think again.

We are used to live in free countries. A few years back, taking out the laptop wasn't necessary. A few years back they did not think of full body scanners. And carrying a swiss army knife or scissors for your fingernails where never a problem. Have you ever seen anyone being killed by fingernail scissors? If one can do that, you can kill with a pen too. You can kill with hands. So why not forbid hands on board?

This is just another episode showing how our freedom gets destroyed by politicians. Wake up voters and claim your freedom back. More laws is less freedom. Life is always a risk, laws don't make them go away. Use your brain wisely instead instead of letting idiotic politicians do what they think is good for them.

Enough for today...

Microsoft Pirates...

For what its worth. I forced myself to install Windows 7 on to my MacBook Pro. Of course into a boot camp partition. But as I like MacOS but once in a while have to use a Windows software, I usually boot it with VMWare. So I went through all the activation rubbish back and forth and so far it looked ok.

Now I'm on travel on a aiprort, fired up VMWare to do something and, there you go. Microsoft distrust its honest customers. The customers who paid like 700US$ for the full blown software. They get punished because they buy their crap.

I should really sue Microsoft for slander! They have still not learned that people can use a Mac and boot from disk or via VMWare (which makes the hardware look to be changed all the time).

Games and privacy

I was in the mood to play a game. So I downloaded "Little Space Duo" to give it a try. But I never had the chance to run this Game. It was complaining it needs to register itself at launch. Now why? Its the first launch of the game. I didn't even had a chance to enter a registration key or anything. So what is it registering??

Now I use LitteSnitch for a very clear purpose. To know when evil programs violate my privacy and send out data I don't want to be sent out. Well in this game's point of view, LittleSnitch is considered evil as it specifically complains about it. Never the less, even if you allow all on LittleSnitch or disable it temporarly, it didn't work. So I did some research on what this app is really doing and did a wireshark trace with interesting results:

The app does connect to www.macgamestore.com and sends the following HTTP request:


GET /blocked/Little%20Space%20Duo HTTP/1.1
Host: www.macgamestore.com
User-Agent: Little%20Space%20Duo/1.0 CFNetwork/454.5 Darwin/10.2.0 (x86_64) (MacBookPro5%2C3)
Connection: close

So far not much information being revealed except my computer's type and architecture.
The response is however indicating more clearly on to why this doesn't work:

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Set-Cookie: bpp=324184256.20480.0000; expires=Fri, 27-Nov-2009 17:41:17 GMT; path=/
Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2009 13:53:22 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.4 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.2.3-1ubuntu6.3 mod_ssl/2.2.4 OpenSSL/0.9.8e
Last-Modified: Tue, 25 Mar 2008 05:53:37 GMT
ETag: "da4b2b-3c2-92d2da40"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 962
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>404 Not Found</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<H1>Not Found</H1>
The requested document was not found on this server.
<P>
<HR>
<ADDRESS>
Web Server at macgamestore.com
</ADDRESS>
</BODY>
</HTML>

<!--
- Unfortunately, Microsoft has added a clever new
- "feature" to Internet Explorer. If the text of
- an error's message is "too small", specifically
- less than 512 bytes, Internet Explorer returns
- its own error message. You can turn that off,
- but it's pretty tricky to find switch called
- "smart error messages". That means, of course,
- that short error messages are censored by default.
- IIS always returns error messages that are long
- enough to make Internet Explorer happy. The
- workaround is pretty simple: pad the error
- message with a big comment like this to push it
- over the five hundred and twelve bytes minimum.
- Of course, that's exactly what you're reading
- right now.
-->

In other words they built a blacklist mechanism into the application and lateron removed the blacklist from the server which makes probably all games complain which have an online connection. The workaround is simply to disable the network interface completely. Then it doesn't complain ;-)

AppStore Dwarfs need glasses...

AppStore Dwarfs are those magic workers behind the scenes at the AppStore. They do a lot of work simultaneously but they don't pay attention to details. Global.AQ 1.0.2 when submitted to the AppStore was rejected by the dwarfs with the comment that sending SMS doesnt work. It was written in the FAQ, on the App documentation, on the website that you must enter phone numbers in international format. Meaning with + in front. Every european who sends SMS across the border knows that. But the american dwarfs don't so they didn't type it correctly. I've heard another developer with a very similar application had exactly the same problem.

Now Global.AQ 2.0 is ready for prime time. First it was hold up due to "itunes disconnect". Then it took a full 2 weeks to get a reply saying, the app doesn't do what the advertisement text was saying.

They complained it doesn't do incoming SMS. Well they tested on AT&T where in fact it doesn't work yet (but AT&T is working on it, I'm sure it does soon) but it does work on a few selected networks (and many more are coming). But the advertisement text was telling this.

Conclusion: the AppStore Dwarfs must be blind. They never read the text fully.

So we have to wait for another 2 weeks. *Sight*

iTunes Disconnect

For those of you who develop iPhone / iPodTouch applications, you are probably familiar with iTunesConnect, Apple's tool to upload iPhone applications. I don't often use it because I'm not producing 100's of iPhone applications every months and for the statistics part I use AppViz which summarises daily everything I want to know.
Now yesterday our Global.AQ software was ready to be released in version 2.0 into the wild after having worked many many months on fine tuning thousands of small little bits. So I pressed:




and then I got this:






for over 15 minutes! So I retried and retried and retried. Nothing seemed to work. As it was already late I decided to try again in the early morning, a time where USA usually went to sleep and European business have not started to work yet so the hope was that servers where completely idle. But no luck either. Even at 07:30 CET, it didn't work. Some users on twitter reported similar problems but success by just waiting. So arrived in the office I did start up Safari and just have it wait.

So I did and got this after like 30 minutes I got:





Trying again, I got another 30 minutes later:






Maybe that's the new way of rejecting developers?

PS: Apparently I'm by far not the only one havin

g this problem. 2 days later its still there. Apple apparently is "aware" but they did not answer any of my e-mails.

Today I even had a new variant of error message

Its getting more and more absurd.



24. Sept. 2007 19:45 CET
I think apple has moved the site from a mac mini to an array of XServes. Upload was out of a sudden possible and blasting fast. Global.AQ PRO 2.0 is finally there. Now we only have to pass the review process (another 2 weeks to wait... )