While I take a short hiatus from iPhone programming, I’m finding that I’m now aware of some parts of the mobile community that I wasn’t before with my head down and chugging along in Xcode. Namely, this nearly-blind worship of Android from the FOSS community, in spite of most any valid criticisms. In fact, it appears to rival the blind fanaticism of the Apple community in some ways, and in some ways is a direct result of the Apple community and company.

Apple fans are known for their reality-distancing opinions and astounding ability to completely detach themselves from truth and fact as necessary, much like fundamentalist Christians when presented with old passages about mixed textiles and stoning women. So it should come as no surprise that there are a ton of iPhone and iPad fans out there that are head-over-heels in love with the damned things and can’t comprehend why any of the AppStore’s numerous misguided policies are anything but “right for the platform” or some other rosy-goggled bullshit line. However, with every fanatic on a given side there will be an equal and opposite fanatic against it. This was true with the old Mac vs. Windows battles and it’s true today with iPhone. The problem is that before Android came to market, there wasn’t another side to back (Windows Mobile? Please. WebOS? Ha!).

So, enter Android, made by the third giant. What amazes me about this is the brilliant move that Google made in making the operating system open source from the start. This not only made it amazingly easy for phone developers to get in and build devices with it, but it also endeared the FOSS crowd to Google instantly (again). Easy adoption, rabid supporters, high availability — a clear winning combination. Indeed, adoption is really taking off and it’s becoming the default OS for new smart phones that would rather not pay licensing fees or have to deal with writing their own shitty OS to compete with the iPhone.

• Never leave the machine plugged in all the time. Laptops are meant to be portable. Using it as a desktop that never runs on the battery will destroy your battery life.
• Cycles are your friend. Never letting the battery complete a cycle will greatly diminish your run-time. Try to avoid charging the battery unless it’s drained past 30%. Any time the battery drains past 50% and charges more than 50% counts as a cycle. The farther you let it drain before the charge – the better its overall health will remain.
• 30 cycles in a year is not a good thing.
• Let the battery drain completely a few times a week.

• Never let it sit for long periods of time without use. Batteries need to be loved or else they won’t love you.

And if you follow those “tips” you’ll have a very healthy NiCad battery and a dead LiIon battery. What is this tool thinking? Has he never looked into this at all?

CYCLES ARE BAD.

Leave the unit plugged in, don’t discharge if possible, and charge as soon as you can when you get near power.

Even Apple says this, so why is this ‘tard being an smug idiot?

One more reason not to trust “community” tips.

So I’ve been posting my updates to Twitter during the conference for a couple of reasons: first, if I tag them “#wwdc” then everyone at the conf will see them and that’s kind of neat and second, FB is pulling them for status, so it’s a quick double-update.

Well, I posted this one yesterday: http://twitter.com/ahknight/status/2092801084

Little did I know, the first part of that was more true than I thought. The Stump guys themselves were searching Twitter for references to themselves and the host, at the start of the show, starts off: “So I saw on Twitter that some guy said he had ‘the best question’ for us tonight. Is he here? Is that guy here?” After that initial, “Oh. Crap.” I stood up to take my lumps only for the host to have apparently moved on to something else. As I went to myself “eh, oh well” one of the other folks on stage points “he’s over there!” and I’m subsequently called out entirely.

“Come up here. Come here.”

So I put some things down and start the long walk up to the stage. As I go there, some big video cameras start to float around me (obviously with operators behind them, but as far as I can see they’re cameras with legs). Yay, make me more nervous. Thanks!

I get up to the stage and the host points to the stage and says to come up there. Oh boy. So I do. He then says some things that I’m sure other people remember but around this time I realize I probably have a social disorder of some kind as everyone sounds like the teacher in Peanuts cartoons. I do make out that he’s said that he’s going to abide by the statement I made: the experts will have two seconds to answer my question. Go.

So I paused and organized my question, much to the disappointment of the audience, though the host backed me up a little with ‘what you don’t know is that just standing on the stage makes you lose 25 IQ points’. Then I released:

“What two pins on the LC III were disabled on the LC II?

It’s not that I didn’t know this before about them; after all, the bunch of kids that fucked over CES last year and ruined the presentations of a lot of hard-working people. No, this just reinforces it.

In early December, Apple said they wouldn’t be presenting at MacWorld anymore and a lot of asses starting saying that the reason the whole company would miss out on the trade show was because SJ couldn’t do the keynote due to his health (which is a rather silly reason to pull a multi-million dollar company out of trade show) instead of the given reason of … it’s just not that important, anymore. Having been to one, I agree. It’s just not that important anymore. The internet has far surpassed it in terms of marketing value and showing up year-after-year is probably a big waste of time and money.

But, of course, people wanted to make it about his health.

Why? Well, Apple’s had a lot of investors worried about the health of Steve Jobs because he’s been getting thinner every time he appears publicly. They worry about how Apple will get on without him, etc. etc. The things that investors do. That’s one thing, but then they made buying decisions based on this. That’s a whole other thing. So SJ writes up a nice little piece explaining what’s wrong and that he’s trying to fix it (and, of course, effectively says that it’s no one else’s business, anyway, which is right). The board responds with a “we’ll let you know if it’s time to worry” statement. All’s well.

Kind of.

Then the bum streaks at Gizmodo throw up the headline that flies in the face of all the facts:

Answering recent coverage about his health, Steve Jobs has published this letter addressed to the Apple community.

After working with Mac OS X Server for a few days trying to setup an Xserve for the business I’m starting to recall all the reasons I told myself I’d never use Mac OS X Server again after leaving Apple.

MySQL client libraries and headers are not included with Mac OS X Server 10.5. If you are developing a MySQL client application for Mac OS X 10.5, you’ll need to download the MySQL client libraries and headers.

You can’t build MySQLdb for Django apps on Mac OS X Server without the MySQL libraries and headers, so follow those directions to get the files and then you can use the MySQL that shipped with the OS rather than trying to fight with another MySQL installation.