I thought, it might be a cool idea to actually proof that something like that should be possible within a few lines of code. No C code, no Objective-C, even more simple: AppleScript (and a little bit of Bash scripting).

However, so I just took about an hour and a half and wrote down this little bad boy:

global used_codes
global code_used

on run
	set used_codes to {}
end run

on idle
	set promocodes to paragraphs of (do shell script "/opt/local/bin/wget --quiet -O - http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/166916511.rss | while read sentence; do for word in $sentence; do echo $word | grep '^[A-Z0-9]\\{12\\}' | sed 's/\\(.\\{12\\}\\).*/\\1/'; done; done | sort | uniq")
	repeat with promocode in promocodes
		set code_used to false
		repeat with used_code in used_codes
			if promocode = used_code then
				set code_used to true
			end if
		end repeat
		if code_used = false then
			tell application "iTunes"
				launch
				activate
				open location "itmss://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/freeProductCodeWizard?code=" & promocode
				copy promocode to the end of used_codes
				set used_codes to used_codes & promocode
			end tell
		end if
	end repeat
	return 30
end idle

Simply hack it into your AppleScript editor and save it as “Application” with the “Stay Open” option clicked. Now after double-clicking the file that has just been created the script starts fetching a Twitter RSS-feed (in this case @verbsapp’s, heh) every 30 seconds, grabs all iTunes promo-codes it can find and automagically redeems them in the iTunes store. If the could is still valid – lucky you. If not, better luck next time! In any case each code will be added to a temporary “black list” so it won’t be redeemed again.

Feel free to customize and use this script! GNU GPL v2 and stuff. Enjoy.

//update: I’ve just adapted the script a bit more to include promo codes with more than 12 characters length. Besides, I’ve applied John’s “patch” to it – thanks for that one John!

global used_codes
global code_used

on run
	set used_codes to {}
end run

on idle
	set promocodes to paragraphs of (do shell script "for word in `/usr/bin/lwp-download 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/166916511.rss' -`; do echo $word | grep '^[A-Z0-9]\\{12,16\\}' | sed 's/\\(.\\{12,16\\}\\).*/\\1/'; done | sort | uniq")
	repeat with promocode in promocodes
		set code_used to "false"
		repeat with used_code in used_codes
			if promocode as string is used_code as string then
				set code_used to "true"
			end if
		end repeat
		if code_used is "false" then
			tell application "iTunes"
				display dialog "Found a new code: " & promocode & " - use it now?"
				launch
				activate
				copy promocode to the end of used_codes
				set used_codes to used_codes & promocode
				open location "itmss://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/freeProductCodeWizard?code=" & promocode
			end tell
		end if
	end repeat
	return 30
end idle

Fast forward to today and the Smartphones we’re using in our everyday life – Blackberries, Pres and Pixies, iPhones and N900s. What’s the biggest part in that whole cellular phone market that changed since the mid/end 90s? Of course, it’s the phone’s technology and the features they provide nowadays. But what’s more important, the whole accessories-ecosystem around those phones actually changed. Today, you see people buying additional battery-packs for their Blackberries, since the phones are already that “Smart” that you’d actually need a constant power-source to make them last for more than a couple of hours of heavy usage. When people buy a mobile phone, they also typically throw some on-the-go charger into the bucket. And maybe also some docking-station for the desk, or even equipment for attaching it to their car’s windshields.

Now the whole accessory-ecosystem goes that far, that people even buy overpriced socks or pieces of silicon formed as protection-sleeve for their Smartphones. Especially within the iPhone user-groups you can see such protection-cases being very popular. But let us look from another perspective at especially those accessories.

When someone buys an iPhone, of course, he’s interested in the phone’s features and probably likes the way the phone integrates with the rest of his personal infrastructure, like laptops, computers/Macs, etc. But of course, only a few people really go for the features-pack only. Probably 90% of the iPhone customers look forward to have a phone that’s so exclusive and so beautiful that you’d hardly like to take it out of the showcase. And exactly at that point, all third-party manufacturers of iPhone accessories come in handy. So, people go and get their iPhones, take them out of the packing and lock them right into some ugly silicon, acrylic, plastic or whatever kind of case to protect their beauty against scratches, dirt and other natural enemies of the glossy piano paint. Sure, I mean, they paid and ass full of money for a brick that blinds you by its glint, so why should these people not try the best to protect it the best they can?

Well, sure they can do that – but where’s the point? I think I can talk for everyone that has ever searched for an iPhone case when I say that 99% of them are ugly as hell and not worth the package they’re shipped in. So, why do people then actually buy an iPhone for its cool look, when they “protect” it most of the time with such a case where the phone’s actual look does not matter anymore? For what? So they can slide it out when they’re feeling lucky and show it to everybody for one blink of an eye and then pack it back into its sleeve?

Of course, you can’t blame the people for that. I mean, why can’t accessory-manufacturers produce electro-magnetic protection shields that build an own atmosphere around the iPhone that does not allow anything else to come through than the owner’s washed hands to touch the touchscreen? I mean come on, that’s what people are waiting for! F*ck invisibleSHIELD, f*ck the pseudo translucent plastic shields that doesn’t absorb hits that could cause the iPhone’s screen to break into million small pieces. The people want cases that doesn’t even allow the iPhone to fall down the stairs or into water!

Yeah, right. Now I can definitely remember those days when I got my first Bosch 509 and protected it with one of the dozen plastic-sleeves against the cruel reality.

Think different, people.

However, I could philosophize even more about the pros and cons of this themeable-web-interface-for-YQL but I’m actually not that much into it to do so. The reason for registering was mainly for the hype’s sake and besides, I actually planned to reserve my everywhere used nickname “devilx” – unfortunately it was already taken by an as-it-seems porn addicted guy.
If this guy should coincidentally follow my blog and read this: I would be very thankful, if you could pass me that subdomain name, so I can make use of it for more than just an empty page named “Default” and following porn. Thank you!

Oh well, enough for today. Read (someday) more on http://mariusmm.tumblr.com/. Enjoy!

However, I’ve decided to take a quick look at the current iWebKit version and patch the framework to have the sliding-animations working again, even on the latest version. Now, that it seems to be working here and also it seems to be working for Christian, maybe others can also benefit from this.

If you would like to use the sliding-animations (no warranty! :-)) on your iWebKit-based design, just download the Framework package attached to this post and apply it to your iWebKit installation. It should be working pretty much out of the box.

Feel free to report bugs if you should find any regarding the sliding. Enjoy!

Download iWebKit_4.6.2_Framework-likability-patch

Sicker Style Bluebird Theme

And yet again, a new theme for the Bluebird Twitter-Client. This time I didn’t just modify an existing one – I took two themes and mashed them up, heh. I took the Bubbling Citrus Bluebird Theme by Sarah Tan and Laurent Baumann and took the Adium Message-Style “Sticker Style” by “bobjr” and threw both in a mixer, heh.

This is one of my first tries to create a bubble-style Bluebird theme. The theme as you can see it on the screenshots uses the DIN Medium font, which is a commercial font. The font is not included in this theme, but it uses alternatives as a replacement, if the font can’t be found on the system.

However, I hope you like the theme. Enjoy!

Download stickerstyle.bbtheme

Ein Sack!

(“Attention on the A81 Heilbronn in direction to Stuttgart, between Ilsfeld and Mundelsheim lies a sack!”)

First of all, I really like the report. Really. I think it’s great that companies take the different pricing models serious and concentrate on judge them. Even if the whole report is sponsored by Microsoft, I still think it’s good. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe that any Apple-Fanboy might convert back to PCs after reading this white-paper. Still, I think (and hope) that some low-brow end users which might be pondering switching form their PC infrastructure to Macs might think twice.

I’m not saying this because I dislike Macs or because I’m getting paid by Microsoft for writing such lines. I’m just one of those Apple users, who use Macs because he loves the way everything is integrated and works out and because it gives him full-blown power over the whole system, since it’s “just a BSD” what runs under its hood – but I also think, that the iStuff is pretty over-priced for no other reason than maybe coolness, as already mentioned in the report.

The point which disappoints me is, that the report did not mention the stuff that matters – really matters. Instead, to me the whole document looks more like a Blog-entry, packed into a PDF and containing some cool spreadsheets and graphs. The comparisons within the report are just silly for an more experienced user. I don’t want to disassemble the whole document now, but I would like to take a specific part (page 9) as example for the reason I think this document is amateurish.

On page 9, the authors visualized the scenario they’ve described within two comparison-tables, one containing the costs for a PC and the other the costs a Mac would bring with it. The first thing I thought was: How come they include the costs for iLife Upgrade, Mac Office, Quicken and other software on the Mac table, while the PC table totally lacks of these packages? Does either the Dell or the HP, which were used as example devices bring such packages with them? I don’t believe so. Besides, what’s with the MobileMe entry? I mean, what for did they include this entry? They haven’t mentioned that any of the family-members would buy an iPhone or iPod Touch which would need to be synchronized over-the-air. And for Mac-2-Mac synchronizations there are very nice alternatives, starting from a low-level rsync up to Fruux, which by the way doesn’t exist that way for Windows.

Another point I don’t get regards the desktop-devices (HP/MacPro). Why did they choose a MacPro (a device for professional use, e.g. by music-, video- or graphic-artists) over an iMac – which would be way less expensive and also already include a 24″ TFT display, so the available panel could be used as secondary head on the iMac or on the MacBook. And why would they want to upgrade their MacPro/iMac with a ATI Radeon HD 4870 in the third year? For the kid to be able to play his ego-shooters? Oh well, guess what, these games probably won’t be available on the Mac, what kinda makes the whole upgrading thing useless. But how about spending the $260/$350 on an Xbox360 or a Playstation 3, what would be best for gaming and stuff anyway?

In the end, looked from a more experienced view, this report is nice for stopping unexperienced user to throw the rest of their money into Apple’s throat and maybe make Apple lower their prices someday, but actually the arguments mentioned within the report are ridiculous. I’m just waiting for the next “Hi, I’m a PC – and I’m a Mac“-commercial.

I...

... hate...

... you...

… @andi.
One day, I will send you such pictures.

Finger Weg!

Just seen when I started my Mac without having my Access Point turned on, heh.

On October the 6th, 1997, Dell’s CEO Michael Dell was asked, what he would do, if he owned the financially stricken Apple Inc. and he answered:

What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders. [link]

A few years later, Mr. Jobs then wrote the following e-mail message to his employees:

Team, it turned out that Michael Dell wasn’t perfect at predicting the future. Based on today’s stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today. Steve. [link]

So as we can see, there has always been differences between Dell and Apple, what – in my opinion – lead to the competitive behavior Dell presents use with their store.

Not that I would regret Dell to be successful with their try, I just don’t believe it. In my opinion, Dell just tried to get into a market that’s ruled by some of the biggest companies world-wide (e.g. Amazon), which are very hard to top. But okay, we will see.

Btw: It’s funny, that I cannot access Dell’s Music Store. The reason: Dell Music Download Store is currently only available for French, English and German Customers. I’m really wondering of how they decide, what kind of customer I am…

iPod Stand

This evening I saw the bunch of old business cards I still have from my former employer lying on my table, and I was wondering whether to throw the majority away or what else I could do with them. I still have over fifty of these tiny little pieces of carton here and just experimented a bit… and well, this is what I came out with.

I was searching for quite a long time to get some kind of stand for my iPod, since I’m already using it as alarm clock and would also love to have it running the “Flip Clock” App on my bedside table at night. Of course, there are stands for the iPhone and the iPod, but I’m not crazy spending over twenty bucks on a dumb stand. A piece of wood or aluminum, whose only purpose is to hold a device. Not connect it to another device (e.g. your Mac or your stereo) – just to hold it. 

However, maybe you like the idea and try it out yourself sometime.

Enjoy!

OpenSuSE 11.1 Winter Boot-Screen?

Description: Some days ago, I arrived at work, booted my laptop and suddenly there was no more greenish boot-screen/-menu. Instead, there was some winter scenery with two walking penguins. I didn’t reconfigure anything the day before, the only thing I did, was installing an “autofs” patch which (as the description told me) should have fixed some serious bug. However, I still don’t understand what happened there, maybe just some easter-egg? But, it’s not eastern yet. However, after the next reboot, the boot-menu changed back to its regular appearance. Maybe just some of my colleagues was playing me a joke… hm.

That's an OEM-Product.

Where the fsck can I get this application?

Andi had a brand-new BMW 3-Series over the weekend and yesterday I asked him if he’d like to take me to the local supermarket, since I needed to buy some things for preparing the St. Nicholas present for my girl, which by the way comes back today from Hanover. And since my car still smells extremely of gasoline, we just went there with his Beemer. Anyway, when we arrived in front of my apartment we were thinking about what to do on yesterday’s evening and while we were talking I mentioned that Apple opened their fist Store here in Germany, in Munich. So… we just decided to spontaneously visit it.

The way to MUC was pretty crappy, in between Ulm and Augsburg there were showers of rain and even snow. But at around quarter past seven we arrived near the Rosenstraße, where the Apple Store is located. The store itself looks very cool – just like Apple Stores always do, heh. Unfortunately, it was extremely crowded, what made it impossible to freely walk through the “halls of glory” and enjoy the new Apple products. I then saw the new MacBooks for the first time in “real life” – they are even sexier than I thought, heh. I really adore the new aluminium-with-black-gloss-design.

I was actually thinking of buying maybe my first game for the Mac or at least a pocket for the iPod Touch I’ll hopefully receive by tomorrow – but the prices kept me from doing that. I know, it’s Apple, but meh? I mean, €55 for a game (Rollercoaster Tycoon 3) that’s over four years old?!? Or nearly fourty bucks for an iPod Touch case? I guess Apple knew, why they opened up their first Shop in Munich, heh.

However, I also took some snapshot of the trip and the shop itself, just take a view at my Picasa WebAlbum. It was pretty and Munich is a very beautiful and nice city – compared to Stuttgart. I think I would really enjoy living there…

Trust WB-1200p Setup

Well… sure. Of course. I know.

Twitter database maintenance

Seen some days ago on twitter.com

I can recognize some similarities there.

(and yes, installed Ubuntu 8.10 on VMware Fusion. Now I’m just building the VMware Tools for the Guest.)

UPDATE: I just talked to gicmo, since he has Parallels installed on his Mac, and asked him to give me the ouput of ps aux | grep -i parall, so that I can compare it to my ps aux | grep -i vm (yepp, I’ve just installed the Fusion Demo) output… and well.. I guess I can call it equal. Each of these two products has some daemons running in background, even if the application itself isn’t or even hasn’t been running since the Mac started up. For me, both of them solve the actual problem I have: Virtualizing other operating systems (Linux, Win, UNIX, etc.) on my Mac. Now I need to figure out, what the details are, that make one product look better than the other. I guess I’ll need to search for some comparison of “Parallels vs. VMware Fusion“, using the recent versions of both. Maybe I’ll find something.

The first Snow, this morning.

When I got this morning, I’ve been pretty shocked when my precious girl happily screamed “SNOW!!!” through the apartment. First I actually did not believe her and though she would just want to fool me, but after taking a look out of the window (yepp, I don’t do that right after I wake up, …) I saw it myself: This morning the first snow for this year just fell and accordingly to that the traffic was chaotic and dangerous. I’ve seen three accidents on the highway while driving slowly to work and really had to pay attention to not involve myself into a fourth one. I guess I really need to buy snow-tires this year.

I was really surprised of the snow, especially with the past few years in mind. In this region of Germany we didn’t had snow until the middle of Januar in the last two years, so I assumed that it’ll be the same this year – which is why I didn’t organize myself some snow-tires till yet. I’m really afraid of tomorrow being even snowier than today.

Anyway, what else happened in the last few days/weeks(/months?). I haven’t been blogging anymore, since I’ve ordered an upgrade of my webspace at Strato (on the 10th of October) and they told me to backup everything I have uploaded on my account. This request made me think “Hm, let’s not write anything anymore, let’s not change content, in a few they the upgrade will be done and I’ll be able to blog again.“… WRONG!* They didn’t seem to be doing anything till now. And besides, they didn’t even answered the mails I wrote, in which I asked for some status info about the upgrade. I’m kinda disappointed of the Strato support on this, because actually I had the support center as a pretty good and reliable contact point in mind. Eh, I’ll just wait and see what happens. At least they didn’t charge me for anything – yet.

What else is new… well. Today my salary arrived, so I ordered a new iPod Touch. But I think this is not worth mentioning, since everyone has an iPod Touch today. Lately I’ve seen the Apple Keynote for October and I really fell in love with these new aluminum (A-LU-MI-NI-UM, dear AE-speakers, not “aluminum” ) MacBooks Apple presented. I think it would be a great gadget for the Norway trip mpain and I’m planning for next year.

However, so far. I think I’ll start up blogging again, until I’ll receive at least some info from Strato.

* Thanks again to Michael for this link! It’s amazing funny.

It says “WMA/MP3/CD-Receiver with Front AUX-Input”. First of all, I personally never saw such an AUX-Input on my head unit, especially not on its front. And second, some lines later at the bottom (at “Ausstattungsmerkmale Audio”) they say: “AUX-Eingang Nein” (no AUX-Input).

Hm… funny.