The problem

About two weeks ago I noticed my iPhone 5 had a faint, but ugly pink hue in the center of the screen. At first I suspected some software issue, because it looked as if the hue was exactly in the area an iOS7 table view uses for its cells to be displayed (i. e. full screen, but with a few points of inset on the left and right edges). Apparently someone must have left some kind of view with a red-ish color behind the table view that was now shining through, because of all the translucency effects iOS7 comes with.

Turns out though, that this was going on in all kinds of apps, including Instapaper, Pocket, Chrome, Safari Calendar etc. All those certainly would not put any views behind the actual content. Getting more suspicious I showed the problem to several colleagues who all did not see it at first, but once I had pointed it out to them (most visible on a white background) none of them could "unsee" it, …

For the week of August 24th, 2012: Everybody’s Preparing for OpenWorld Dispelling the Rumors of MySQL’s Impending Doom On Piracy of Design IOUG Podcast 24-AUG-2012 Rumors of MySQL’s Doom by Oracle / Design Piracy Subscribe to this Podcast (RSS) or … Continue reading →

Lesson for the week: If you really want to stir up an anthill, attack the conventional wisdom of code development best practices.

In other news ...

Another piece of Sun falls off the good ship Oracle

At this point, I could almost follow the practice of Gregg Easterbrook 's Tuesday Morning Quarterback and put this text on Autotext, but in the past week, Oracle cast off another piece of their acquired Sun technology. In this case, it was the integrated build platform "Hudson." Either fed up with the infighting that had led to the spin-off "Jenkins" project, or simply …

I was recently in the USA for #mysqlconf and to save some money I got myself a AT&T prepay card to use for data and messages. The prepay card did not work out of the box as there is firmware specific lock ins to the AT&T network (APN settings) so here are the steps you must take to enable it on your international iPhone / iPad.


This will be useful if you are from overseas and attending #velocity or #oscon this year.

• Your iPhone / iPad must be unlocked so it can take another SIM card
• AT&T prepay only issue full size sims - they do not issue microsim (another way to prevent you from using prepay with your iPhone / iPad). As a result, you must buy the full sized sim and cut it down using the steps detailed to micro-sim …

Time is flying by so fast, it sure doesn’t seem like it was last year I was blogging about how Android is for real. Well, let me reiterate … Android is for real. The reason I say that and stress that is despite its success, we see a variety of legal threats, accusations and actual lawsuits to come flying at Android as fast as it is growing in the market.

Still, we seem to be able to fairly easily find agreement among vendors, developers and users that Android development is not slowing down, that legal maneuvering will not pave a path to success or that any ruling or action will take Android-based phones out of consumers’ hands. This is not to say that Android faces significant challenges: real fragmentation and version overload; a software development pace that may be too fast for handset makers or consumers; innovation from rivals …

David Cornelson of TextFyre has embarked on an ambitious plan to create a new open source virtual machine, FyreVM.  This new VM will run Interactive Fiction games (e.g. Zork and newer works written in Inform) on a dozen different mobile platforms such as Android, WinPhone 7, Kindle, iPhone, iPad, Blackberry.  The goal of FireVM is to take advantage of specific user interface capabilities on each platform, whether it's the touch screen of Android tablets or the 5 way button on the Kindle.

To help with this project, TextFyre has started  a fundraising effort on Kickstarter with a goal of …

MySQL Cluster in iBooks

MySQL documentation has now been made available in ePub format (fetch the MySQL Cluster versions from http://dev.mysql.com/doc/index-cluster.html ). This format is intended for various book readers.

I’ve tried it on 2 iPhone applications; Apple’s iBooks and the iPhone version of Stanza. The documents render well in both applications but as with most reference books you get the best results if you reduce the font size so that you get more on the screen at once.

With both applications, you can add the books through iTunes but Stanza also has the advantage that if you browse to the document in Opera on the iPhone then it gives you the option of opening it in Stanza – cutting out the need to use iTunes. I also …

Compliance. Funding. Financial results. Copyright assignment. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

Compliance
# The Linux Foundation launched the Open Compliance Program, including tools, training, and consulting.

Funding
# VentureBeat reported that Joyent has raised $7m in a second round of funding.

# Basho Technologies secured $2m from angel investors in a Series C preferred equity financing.

# …

I like both Adobe (Lightroom rocks!) and Apple (iPad rocks!), but I’ve been asked over and over again what I think about Apple’s new 3.3.1 policy. You know, the one that basically bans cross-platform development frameworks. And, in particular, basically nails the Flash coffin shut on iPhone/iPod/iPad. So, what do I think?

I love it.

And I’m surprised more developers, end users, business leaders, and general web standards lovers everywhere aren’t posting about how great this is.

It’s good for end users.

The App Store already has a signal-to-noise problem. With hundreds of thousands of apps, finding the good stuff is tough. Bear in mind that every single one of those Apps was built by someone intentionally designing for these devices – and we’ve still got plenty of …

Topics for this podcast:

*Matt Asay moves from Alfresco to Canonical
*GPL fade fuels heated discussion
*Apple’s iPad and its enterprise and open source impact
*Open source in data warehousing and storage
*Our perspective on Oracle’s plans for Sun open source

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