My inlaws' computer hard drive died the other day, so I offered to help them buy a new Windows computer at the local shop. The specs were easy: Windows, Core i5, 4GB RAM and ~500GB drive.

Going in, I expected lots of extra sell-ins. And there were. What I found to be a very funny options, was to have them de-install all the extra crap-ware that comes pre-installed on the system. That's funny! They get probably a few bucks from the software guys to have that pre-installed, and then they get a few bucks from the customer to de-install the software. That must be a great deal for them

It is curious how the economy is described bad all over the place, yet the tech sector is growing and growing. The mobile phone app business is exploding, and Google today announced a 33% jump in revenue to $9.72 billion. This disconnect has been going on for a while, and doesn't seem to have much of an end. Tech just isn't stopping to watch governments that overspend struggle or bankers who made arrogant bets sweat.

So I make my "arrogant" bet: keep working hard to innovate in tech. The mobile revolution today is like the early days of the web. And this is even before the rest of my house is connected and all my life becomes GPS tagged. We have an amazing decade in front of us. Let's keep doing great work, with attention to detail and love for our customers and craft, hopefully without any investors starting new bubbles, and let's make great things happen.

I just quickly want to plug The state of iOS Open Source – and what to do about it! by Fredrik Olsson. It's a great little piece of advice for all us iOS developers

I don't play that many games, but one that I've enjoyed for a number of years has been The Sims. Now that Lion is out and we can talk about it, I found the answer about what to do when it fails with an Unknown Error: Go to ~/Library/Preferences and delete the com.transgaming.* files and the "The Sims 3 Preferences" directory. This will make the game run again.

One thing that I seem to forget from project to project (after all, you only need to take care of this once pr project) is that a deployed Spring project is two parts: model, business and controllers is one part, views are another.

This means that in your web.xml you're likely to have two parts defined, the org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener servlet which contains model, business and controllers, and the org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet that contains your view resolvers and views.

This distinction is important, if nothing else than because it's easy to set the url-pattern for the view servlet too broad, for instance to /*, and this will surely mingle your requests so that you don't really know if it goes to the controller or to the view resolver.

Today was the time for my yearly developer certificate renewal. After invalidating my old certificate and making a new one, removing all old profiles, I got the error above. It took me a little while to figure it out, but while I had generated my Ad Hoc distribution profile, I hadn't actually installed it, so I had my certificate set up for distribution but no mobile provision profile. Just my little d'oh moment, I hope it helps you figure out yours

I'm "imported" to Denmark, and guess what: so is the Danish easter ale tradition. As far as I've understood, the tradition started at the end of the 19th century when a few pubs in Copenhagen around easter would import double-bock beer called Salvator from the German order of Paulaner. This was a beer the monks had been allowed to sell since the 1780s. Whether it was actually the beer of the Paulaner monks is somewhat of a mystery, as this brand was so strong that all the Bavarian stouts were simply called Paulaner Salvator. Serving these beers turned out to be a huge success, so in 1905, Carlsberg, the big Danish beer brewery would make their own easter ale and sell it on tap. The year after, Tuborg, their arch rival, followed with their own easter ale on tap.

Today, there are many small breweries all around Denmark, and each brewery with respect for themselves will have their own easter ale. Some will have them a pinch lighter than a christmas ale, some will have a bottle of pure summer. Speaking of christmas ale, it's actually the easter ale tradition that has given us the christmas beer tradition, not the other way around!

I've been developing apps for the iPhone since the early betas of iOS 2.0, and one of the things I'd like back then was to use SOAP services. Back then, Apple had an old, half-implemented command-line program called wsmakestubs that you could use to generate some stubs that half worked. That program has not been updated, nor has any more SOAP support been added to iOS itself.

What has changed, though, is the eco-system. First off all, we can talk about it and share experiences. Secondly, people have made and shared interesting stuff. One of my favourites is SudzC. It's very interesting, but has been stuck in alpha for a while. Commercial offerings such as WSClient++ are also interesting, but what I've found is that, for the most part, I don't need all this support I was looking for.

Hand-crafting the XML is easy enough. Just grab SOAP Client and fire of a request, then get the raw request and modify that XML. Likewise, check out the raw response and use XPath to grab the parts of the answer you need. Fire off the request with ASIHttpRequest just to make it easier. All in all, getting hooked up to your SOAP service shouldn't take long.

For examples of using XPath, check out this example at Stack Overflow.

So back to the topic, the state is that it's not well supported, but it doesn't need to. Doing it yourself has become easy with great supporting frameworks for requests and XML handling in the iOS eco system.

I'm making OSC controllers for the iPhone, and I just sat down to check out the competition. Some projects, like TouchOSC and OSCemote are for pay. However, they are both out-competed on features and looks by Mrmr by Eric Redlinger. His version is soo much closer to what I have in mind, implements all the features by the two others and is free. That's a mighty good package you have there, Eric.

Status on my week is that I'm not to fond of doing the web-bit, so I'm not giving myself any exposure either. The functionality is coming nicely together for the apps, and I'm starting to get a couple of beta-testers, but I'll probably spend some time finding a couple more. Right now I really need a graphics artist and someone who enjoys doing CSS

The mac world is high on expectations because of what is apparently a shortage of iPhones. New version coming up soon? Yes, probably. People hope for a 3G version. I hope for one too. I expect it to be announced in June and available end August. People think of a 32gb version. Sounds logical. But didn't people notice Intel's announcement of their Atom processor? Here's ZDNet's take on it. I would expect this to mean that an iPhone based on this architecture would be launched, perhaps silently even. Just a bit more horse power, very fitting for iPhone OS 2.0. Perhaps with a 32gb option. But still EDGE, no 3G. Then a 32gb version with 3G could be announced in June and become widely available in august.

The picture, promised in the last podcast (yes, it's been too long, but we've got material brewing ) is finally here, found on a CD in a big pile of CDs with images

Recently two screen shots appeared of the upcoming Leopard. Everyone is screaming fake, even the author sais so. But a solution like in the first picture would actually make complete sense. I mean, for OS X Apple has basically been making a nice layer that everything interfaces. First up, the reason I switched: X11. X11 integrates quite nicely with OS X and keeps in style with Aqua without loosing the X11 feel. Classic has been running on OS X from day 1 (not sure if it's still running on those shiny Intel Macs), and after a boot-up the applications integrate nicely with Aqua but retain the Mac OS 9 feel. In comes Mac OS X for Intel, all PPC are done through Rosetta, and voila, it looks like its running native, and is nicely integrated with Aqua. Now would it be so strange to conceive that Windows is booted in the background running in its own environment just like Mac OS 9 does on the PPC and the applications integrating with the lovely window manager Aqua? I don't think so. What I think is that it's time to bump up that X11 integration to make it a tan smoother. And I know that I'd prefer FreeBSD booting up in the background and using Aqua for my window manager.

So where is this screenshot? Well, it'll probably go offline soon, but in the meanwhile: http://www.picturetrace.com/images/leopard_img01.0.png

From the rest of the speculations that followed the fake screenshots: I don't think I prefer a tabbed Finder. While a cool idea at first, I think I'd be clicking to much between windows. If tabbed, then just not the way proposed in the screenshots. Second, I don't need Adress Book and Calendar integrated, I need tighter integration between these apps and other apps I use, for instance Google Mail/Google Calendar, Thunderbird, Firefox etc). For the OS X/Windows integration, if Apple isn't already working on a scheme like this (I'm sure they are) then they should hire this guy and exploit his imagination

Here is yet another of my favourite quotes from Mattheson's Der vollkommene Capellmeister:

"Others, who think they know much more about [The Origin of Song] and who maintain no small reputation to this day, seem yet more wrong to me than the previous ones: since they, with Lucretious as their leader, made the unthinking bird the inventor of divine music. Hence, one of these may write that the first inventors of vocal music had been monkeys, because they aped this art from birds; in this however, in my opinion, the good man really acts quite apish. For anyone who has nothing sensible to say has no cause to abuse."

Hehe, I can just imagine the conversations Mattheson and Darwin would have had if they'd ever met.

One of my favourite quotes from Mattheson's Der vollkommene Capellmeister is from the foreword: "...the four principal rivers wich originate ther [in Paradise]. But now the most common opinion on the location of Paradise is that it was situated in Mesopotamia toward Armenia, thus Eden must have been on the land which stretches between the Tigris and Euphrates up to the Armenian mountains. Certainly a fine spot!"

Certainly a fine spot indeed. Looks like a great place for a holiday trip.