Technology
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Yesterday, while I was organizing my apps, I received a push notification badge that made my iPhone go a little wacky. The screen seems to have been pushed one row higher and no matter what button I pushed, the screen remained unresponsive. Shutting down and rebooting cleared the problem, but it was a strange bug to discover.
I posted a screen capture of the errant iPhone home screen.
I’ve had an iPhone of some type since August 2008, and this is the first time this has happened. And come to think of it, what are the odds that this will happen. I just wonder why the push notification badge causes the home screen to lock up when arranging apps on the screen.
Yesterday, ArsTechnica posted an article about the Motion Picture Patents Company, an early 20th century patent pool and cartel established by Thomas Edison to protect the profits of his and his partners companies. Colorfully called, Thomas Edison’s Plot to Destroy the Movies, the article is an accessible summary of the cartel was formed, how it controlled the film industry at the expense of innovation, and how it was eventually undermined by a group of independent filmmakers, led by Universal’s Carl Lamelle.
ArsTechnica writes about this as a cautionary tale of how large companies who control a media industry, such as Internet access, recorded music, or even the movies, can stand in the way of innovation once they grow so powerful and unchallenged by competition.
Sarah’s been using this computer for a few months and all of a sudden, yesterday, it just stopped working properly. We would get a black screen of death, the always frightening kernel panic screen.
As any good boy would do, I thought I would just wipe the hard drive and reinstall the operating system. But because this computer is a Powerbook from 2004 (when I got this the Red Sox were last champions in 1918), I had to use Leopard.
And now it looks like my deprecated, Mac OS install disc has become corrupted so I need to find a new one now.
But if it’s a hardware issue, it will be time to say goodbye to an old friend. I have since replaced this guy with a MacBook Pro but this was always a reliable computer, having gone to many classes and having travelled to many conferences. Sarah gave it a second life after I got the MacBook Pro, but we’re still going to miss this old reliable computer.
Since I bought the 2009 iMac 21″, I had noticed that the computer was running “hot.”
Looking at the Activity Monitor utility, the CPU would be running really high and applications would run pretty slow. One process in particular, launchd, would be taking up nearly 15% of the CPU, which seemed very strange considering no other application took up so much processing power.
With the increased processor load, Mail would often crash over and over again. Also, applications that used audio or video would often hang even before they opened and would never respond. (By audio and video applications, I mean iTunes, Quicktime Player, Airfoil, Pulsar, Radioshift and even VLC.) I also tried to activate my Firewall, and System Preferences would hang, too. Clearly, something is wrong.
Looking at the Console utility, I noticed that one entry that came up repeatedly in the diagnostic logs: Adobe Version Cue. It also noted that the parent process of Version Cue was “launchd.” After digging around on the Internet, I saw that many bulletin boards recommended uninstalling the “Version Cue Server. It turns out that very few firms actually use this functionality.
In Applications/Utilities/Adobe Installers, you can add/remove specific components of Adobe CS3. So I had this utility uninstall Adobe CS3 Version Cue Server, and just like that the Activity Monitor Dock gauge went down to a nice low reading.
So there you go, if you’re having problems with media applications hanging, a runaway launchd process, and you have Adobe Creative Suite installed, try uninstalling the Version Cue Server.
Maybe it’s because I just did a class on contemporary privacy in the media industries, and used Facebook as a case study, but it looks like the amount of information available to anyone on Facebook was enough to find the guy who found the iPhone prototype.
On Thursday, Wired has a story on the guy who found the iPhone and then reportedly sold it to Gawker’s Gizmodo website. In the story, we learn that “Wired.com identified Hogan as the finder of the prototype by following clues on social network sites, and then confirmed his identity with a source involved in the iPhone find.”
If that doesn’t put a little bit of caution before you post any shenanigans on Facebook, consider this timeline of Facebook’s privacy policies over the years.
A week ago I bought a third-party iPhone charger from my new favorite online cables/parts/accessories supplier, Monoprice, that cost less than $4.00. I wanted one to keep at the office that would charge my phone and that the other folks at the office could use, too. So I ordered three of them so I would have one just about anytime I needed one.
Well, I got the chargers over the weekend, but when I tried to charge my phone, it wouldn’t charge for more than five minutes. I tried the other charge, figuring that if this thing retailed for $4.00, it likely cost $0.40 to make and quality control might be lacking. The second one had the same problem. Damn! The phone charges fine with the OEM charger and through my MacBook Pro’s USB so we can deduce that the iPhone is capable of taking a charge.
<pSo as a “hail mary,” I brought the third charger with me to work, and guess what? It works. It has fully charged my iPhone and I’ve been listening to it most of the day. Well, go figure.
