Peter’s Blog

Had a great time at Picnic today. Met tons of great people, including the head of a top ad agency in Russia, a cinematographer for Survivor and just about the whole Dopplr team. Awesome! Tomorrow I’m part of the Hot100 program.

As the saying goes, God made the world but the Dutch made the Netherlands. Of course, no landscape is untouched: walk through the British countryside and what seems to be untouched forests and hills turn out be forests planted several centuries ago and hills continuously molded over the past millenia by human activity. On the road from Haarlem to Schipol I once saw a grass-covered ziggurat-shaped hill with an incredibly straight alley of trees running by it. Rather than pretending that their environment isn’t man-made – the British aren’t the only offenders at maintaining such an illusion though I think they’re some of the worst – the Dutch celebrate the artificialness of their landscape. Building on that thought, there’s a great piece in the Herald Tribune about an MIT professor encouraging a polluted region in Italy to embrace man-made nature.

I’ve switched the RSS feeds over to Feedburner. Please let me know if you have any problems getting updates. The main feed is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/beachheadonline/fMqv and the comments feed is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/beachheadonline/BxVX.

One of my IMAP accounts is taking up over 400 mb on the server and is causing problems, such as bounced messages, so I set out to download all the old messages to my computer and then wipe the data from the server. Unfortunately, Mail.app (my primary mail client) doesn’t have any sort of Export or ‘Copy to local machine’ function, so I had to develop a work around.

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What awaits the iPhone in Europe? - International Herald Tribune

Wow. What a stupid article. Don’t get it me wrong, it’s well written and I think the central point, that iPhone sales in Europe have disappointed, is correct. However, I think they completely missed the reason why. It’s simple: many Europeans are buying iPhones in the US. Cracked iPhones are much cheaper (would you rather pay €400 or $400?) and they’re really easy to get. I know lots of people that buy several iPhones when visiting the US, and there are even companies that give them away in contests here in the Netherlands. Consider this:

Fueling speculation about an imminent strategic change by Apple are early sales of the device in Europe. Strategy Analytics, a research firm in Milton Keynes, England, estimates that Apple sold 350,000 iPhones in Europe in the fourth quarter of last year, below what it claims is Apple’s internal forecast of 500,000 devices.

The research firm also estimates that iPhone sales slowed to 300,000 in the first three months of this year.

But we’ve also heard that 1 million US iPhones were never registered with AT&T. Assuming that 2/5 of those unlocked phons went to Europe (which seems to be a reasonable guess to me), that’s 100,000 extra phones ‘purchased’ each quarter in Europe, which means Apple is actually close to its targeted sales.

…we should be worrying about peak helium!

Three Smart Things You Should Know About Helium

if it continues to be consumed at the current rate, it’ll be gone in nine years.

This article is just amazing: cityofsound: Transport informatics

And Jack, you’ll like that Boston is doing some cool stuff with biking.

Bike network 2.0
Boston appointed a ‘bike czar’, Nicole Freedman, and her team has used Google Maps to create a set of bike routes across the city, based on the aggregated data from actual routes that cyclists took across the city“We found out where the actual desire lines are,” said Freedman, and has since extended the network to enable users to rate streets for bikes. It’s a little rudimentary at the moment, but shows the promise of such systems. Boston are building the city’s first official bike map from the results of the system.

Video Road Hogs Stir Fear of Internet Traffic Jam - New York Times

Last year, by one estimate, the video site YouTube, owned by Google, consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000.

No wonder Google is helping to build a new transpacific fiber cable.

I’m excited I got this working, so I figured to share this. Hopefully at least one person will stumble upon this in a Google search and be helped by it.

I have a phone plan with Rabo Mobiel (an MVNO) and (eventually will) have an unlimited data plan for €10 per month. It’s only GPRS right now but apparently once the network switches from Orange to KPN in mid April I’ll also be getting UMTS. Fair enough.

First, I wanted to get internet browsing working on my Nokia N73. Unfortunately when I used the phone wizard to get the network settings, it grabbed Orange access information. Which didn’t work. Super. However a quick Google search turned up a page on a somewhat shady site (they say they’re located in Amsterdam and China, but random parts of the site are in Russian). This page has what I needed: the names of the Rabo Mobiel access points are ‘Rabo’ and ‘Rabo.extra’. The latter is, according to the site, for unlimited data plans, so I used that. Entering it into my phone gave me mobile internet and now I have the Jaiku and Gmail apps on the phone. Nice.

But, what I really wanted was for my phone to act as a modem for my Macbook Pro. No more wishing for an internet connection at OpenCoffee! It’s kind of tricky but Ross Barkman is the man and has what you need: manufacturer-specific connection scripts. I downloaded the Nokia GPRS scripts and put them into /Library/Modem Scripts/ as instructed. After a fair bit of trial and error I got everything working. What I did was associate my phone with the laptop using Bluetooth and select the option to use the phone as a modem, using Ross’ Nokia GPRS CID1 script (unfortunately the +CGQREQ script, which is supposed to make things faster, doesn’t work for me). I then went to System Preferences > Network > Bluetooth and edited some settings. Under PPP I set the telephone number to be ‘Rabo.extra’ and then I clicked on PPP Options and unchecked Send PPP Echo Packets. From the PPP pane I clicked Dial Now and then Connect in the Internet Connect window that opens. Boom, my laptop’s on the internet using my mobile phone!

Note, while playing around with settings I made several other modem profiles in Internet Connect. While the profile that I use is called Main Number in Internet Connect, when clicking the modem status icon in the menu bar it was called Bluetooth. Weird.

This probably isn’t useful for many people, but I just figured this out and it’s quite useful for my work:

I work with several different Subversion repositories. Recently we’ve set up a new repository for one of my clients but previously the code was in my personal repository, which also has some other projects in it. Of course, me having several projects in my personal repository is not recommended practice and in cases like this, I can see why: it means I had to do this whole silly process, instead of something simple like svn switch --relocate. But the damage is done, so I had to figure out how to deal with it. This was my quick and dirty solution to syncing branches with identical structures while coming from un-identical repositories:
svn export [up-to-date repository] code1
svn checkout [out-of-date repository] code2

Now I have the new, ‘clean’ (ie not revision controlled) code in code1 and the old, revision controlled code in code2. I want to just drop everything from code1 into code2. Worried about over-writing .svn files if I did a simple copy in OS X, I instead FTPed into my own computer (ie to localhost) and then just dropped everything in the code1 directory into code2. Then it was a simple matter of running svn update and svn commit and my old, personal repository is now up to date.