Why we like Apple software --- most of the time

With Nullsoft, Frankel's modus operandi had been to write the best software he could, then give it away for nothing. At AOL the business of selling software threatened to overwhelm the software itself. "The products that I worked on, it was very much like, We want to make this money out of this. We're doing this deal with these other companies, and so the product is going to do this as a result," he remembers. "No one cared about how users actually experienced it."

via time.com

It's that Apple don't have that many partners.

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Whig History is nonsense.

Pretending that because history has been mostly good, we should take a blanket optimistic outlook is just Whig history nonsense. Whig history is the line we were all fed in school, and its main purpose seems to be to tell us that the status quo is great and there is nothing to worry about.

via acceleratingfuture.com

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Boot EC2 Instance With ssh on Port 80

In a thread on the EC2 forum, Marko describes a situation where an outbound firewall prevents the ability to ssh to port 22, which is the default port on all EC2 instances.

In that thread, Shlomo Swidler proposes creating a user-data script that changes sshd to listen on a port the firewall permits.

Here’s a simple example of a user-data script that does just that. Most outbound firewalls allow traffic to port 80 (web/HTTP), so I use it in this example.

The first step is to create a file containing the user-data script:

cat <<'EOM' >user-data-ssh-port-80.txt #!/bin/bash -ex perl -pi -e 's/^Port 22$/Port 80/' /etc/ssh/sshd_config /etc/init.d/ssh restart EOM

The first statement changes the sshd config to listen on port 80 instead of port 22, and the second statement restarts sshd so it will start using this new configuration.

Now you can run a new instance on Amazon EC2, passing in this user-data script. Since the AWS APIs use standard web ports, most outbound firewalls will let through these types of requests. In this example, I use an Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid AMI from Canonical which was current as of this article. Please use the most recent AMIs available.

ec2-run-instances --key YOURKEYPAIR --region us-east-1 --instance-type t1.micro --user-data-file user-data-ssh-port-80.txt ami-6c06f305

Save the instance id created and make a note of the IP address once it starts. Now you can ssh in to port 80 using the keypair you specified:

ssh -p 80 -i YOURKEYPAIR.pem ubuntu@184.72.134.192

After testing this, don’t forget to terminate your EC2 instance.

See also: Escaping Restrictive/Untrusted Networks with OpenVPN on EC2

Disclaimer

These instructions are not intended to assist in illegal activities. If you are breaking the laws or rules of your government or college or company or ISP, then you should understand the implications and be willing to accept consequences of your actions.

via alestic.com

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Article: Books are a waste of time…

This post by Boris is funny as hell.

Books are a waste of time… [TNW Entrepreneur]
http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2010/11/24/books-are-a-waste-of-time/

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Books are a waste of time… Books are a waste of time…

Posted on Nov 24th, 2010 by Boris

Join a group of inteligent jazz-loving wine-drinking technology-avoiding book-lovers and tell them the following:

“I hate reading books. I just don’t see the point. In fact, I don’t understand where people find time to read. And why should you do it anyway? What do you get out of it? Nah, I’m skipping the whole book-reading hype”

Saying something like that will certainly make you a social outcast right away. You just can’t say something like that. Books are beautiful, full of knowledge and entertainment. Books are holy.

So why is it perfectly fine for that same group of people to mock the Internet? Why is it okay, when you are above a certain age, to be so dismissive about blogs, Twitter and Facebook?

I don’t go around claiming that I suffer from information overload when I enter a library? Or that reading magazines is a waste of time? Then why is it just fine to ignore the biggest source of information the world has ever seen?

I just don’t get it when intelligent people think it is okay to be so dismissive about new technology. The next time someone is telling me they don’t like the web or don’t see the point in Twitter I’m going to tell them that books are a waste of time. And then I’m going to smack them over the head with one.

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