By Graham K. Rogers

Opening Gambit:

Apple Stuff

I tend to use the iPad more and more when teaching and for a lot of other tasks. The students notice and are more interested too. Some asked me recently about the iOS version of Keynote which I use for presentations in class. In Thailand the government has its own tablet program for schools that is lurching from one decision to the next: no one really knows what to do or how to use the things. Apple has stepped in with its own initiative and will provide some schools with iPads, plus the needed instruction for teachers. In the meantime, have a look at an item by Asam Shah who has a list of 10 incredible iPad apps for education. I have some of those listed and feel that the list here is more for high school students although some of the note-taking apps like Bamboo or Paper could work with most groups.

Over the weekend I finished writing a review of Carat an iOS app developed at UC Berkeley that analyses use to see which apps either are power hogs or have power bugs. One of the apps that it was suggested should be killed on the iPad was Keynote and I leave it running almost all of the time with the number of presentations I do. The other on the iPad was the app from The Next Web which I looked at a couple of times and never usually touch, preferring RSS feeds and a browser. I had not used it in weeks, but it was still running in the background. Not now.

Over the last few months, we have seen many rumours about a 7" iPad and thought that this was unlikely, although the continuing appearance of these rumours is wearing me down a bit. There were some more this week and Tony Smith suggests that instead of following the rumours, we follow the sources: the stories on which the leaks were based, may well have been planted. One of the main rumour sources according to Smith and to Sam Oliver on AppleInsider is Bloomberg and Oliver notes that "The last few days have seen a flurry of news related to" this rumoured device.

Over the weekend another twist was added in an article on AppleInsider who report of a rumour third or fourth hand, from a Chinese site. The main idea is that this is to be made in Brazil where Foxconn set up some facilities last year, with an expected release date now of September.

To add to this, Matt Burns on Tech Crunch tells us that the latest rumours have this "iPad mini . . . thinner than the Kindle Fire [and] the overall thickness that of the iPod touch 4G." The idea is that this is less an iPad mini as a beefed up iPod nano.

Also it will float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.

There have been rumours about a service that would allow those with iPhones to make payments with the device, and the announcement of Passbook with iOS 6 made some people sit up. However, there is unlikely to be a total payments system with this, at least for the time being, as Apple is holding back Jessica E. Vascellaro reports on Wall Street Journal. She outlines the potential services that others are working on before enlarging on the way Apple is biding its time on the inclusion of credit card facilities for payments made via the iPhone.

There seemed to be an odd decision from Apple this week when it was announced that it had asked for all of its products to be removed from a US government program listing the environmentally friendly nature of our devices: the EPEAT group. An article by Edward Moyer and several other sources I read were carrying this information. As the government itself and certain corporations require EPEAT certification this looked to be an odd move, although with most sales outside the US these days, and the products from Apple being highly desirable, who cares? Apple may be ready to create their own specifications here.

In the US, AT&T are to start a new service that will complement Apple's Find my iPhone and apply to other brands of phones that owners use on the network. This service will start tomorrow (10 Jul) AppleInsider reports and can be activated by an owner and this will "deny that device voice, data and text messaging access while keeping their account intact". If the phone is unusable its value is reduced in the case of theft and intended resale.

I did have an extended look at the theft of mobile devices on this weekend's eXtensions podcast but while we are on security, I want to repeat a story about theft of a notebook computer on a flight in this region: the thief passed through Bangkok twice (which is incidental).

With something like 624,000 laptops each year missing or stolen in airports (a staggering 1,200 a week at LAX) Khushwant Singh on the Straits Times wrote of a S. Korean businessman who stole an engineer's laptop while on a SIA flight. The poor victim did not realise until he got to his hotel as the thief put a heavy magazine in the laptop bag: that is clear evidence of intent.

The police were able to identify the suspect; and to compound the idiocy here, the Korean took a return flight back through Singapore still carrying the stolen device. Arrested and charged, there is no information as yet about punishment. I hope it is severe as many people will have their digital lives on these computers and a loss will cause major problems over and above the value of the computer.

I have mentioned the new Podcasts app from Apple a couple of times since I resurrected the eXtensions podcasts and a tip on MacOS X Hints tells users that it is not only for the podcasts already subscribed to, but we may also add any other podcast we have the feed URL for. As a reminder the one for eXtensions is www.extensions.in.th/postpod/extensions.xml so, be my guest if you are not already subscribed.

A friend was having problems with his Airport Express: the device that connects to a network and streams music (or video if you have Apple TV) all over the house. At least that is the idea but it seems to be a mystery to many in this area. I made one or two suggestions regarding passwords (it uses WEP) and using "bridging" on the device (or turning it off as an alternative) and he managed to get it going by Sunday morning but without a password. An Apple KB document (HT 1344) tells us that when choosing a password for WEP networks -- Wired Equivalent Privacy --

• For a 40 bit WEP network, always choose a 5-character password.
• For a 128 bit WEP network, always choose a 13-character password.

Telephone numbers are not suitable, either for key length or for security.

I had hoped to have my iMac back a little sooner from the repairer, but when I went to the U-Store and asked, there was a problem with the hard drive. There was some communication problem and while I had bought a 2.5" 500 GB drive through the department techie, the shop told me this was the wrong size. What I wanted was a 5". Read on for qualification of this.

I asked the staff member at the U-Store to have the Toshiba drive brought back as I would have it changed. When I told the department technician, he spotted immediately that my information was wrong. There are no 5" hard drives: did the shop guy mean 3.5" He may well have done but I am fairly clear on the difference in Thai between 5 and 3.5 and sure that what I was told was 5": wrong as it may be.

"Why did I ask for a 2.5" drive?" I was asked.

"I didn't." That was what I was given.

"But you asked for it."

Yes you did; no I didn't. Yes you did; no I didn't. Yes you did; no I didn't. Yes you did; no I didn't.

I have the wrong disk. A new one is needed. This will be fixed.

Half and Half

While we are on Samsung, I have a story that puts them in the place of victim. Not so long ago there was a story of spontaneous combustion of an iPhone on an aircraft. The investigation found that the overheating battery was due to a wrongly replaced screw when the device was repaired by an unauthorised dealer. There was also a story of an exploding Samsung Galaxy SIII. The owner claimed damages, posted images and Samsung had a look of course. Any responsible company would. Bryan Bishop reports that the cause was another unauthorised repair after the device had been exposed to water and then "the heat build-up that caused the explosion was due to an external source. . . . The phone had very likely been placed in a microwave oven." The complainant has now withdrawn his claim. I should think so too: Samsung ought to chase him through the courts to make it really clear that false claims damage the reputations of the companies.

Other Matters

Rene Ritchie has some comments on the Samsung-Apple injunction and the anger of Samsung fans. He says they are right to be angry with Apple which I disagree with: if the patents are abused (see below) there is redress; and the Judge made that decision, not Apple.

He goes further and also suggests that their real anger should be directed at Google and I do agree with that. He writes, "it's easy to cast Apple, Microsoft, Oracle et. al. as the bad guys. They're giant, nasty for-profit corporations, after all."

And then this: ". . . . But so is Google" -- and then the crux -- "Google had systematically and recklessly displayed such indifference to the intellectual property of others -- -- from huge corporations to private citizens, as to border on contempt."

I was a bit surprised when there was no real decision in the earlier Google-Oracle case over Google's free use of Java in Android, but with that part of the case ended, expected the whole thing to go away. Not a chance, having lost, or not won (depending on how you view it) Electronista reports that Google legal representatives have sent Oracle a bill for a cool $4 million to "cover the costs generated during this year's Java court battle" and included is "$2.9 million for organization of copied court-necessary documents, $143,341 for transcript services, and $986,978 for compensation of the court-appointed experts.

It is expected that Oracle will fight this too.

News of last week was deluged by the large Hadron Collider at CERN and its tricks with the universe. A few pictures were available, but the Atlantic has a series of 34 photographs that look at the installation, starting from some of the first excavations of the caverns in which the device and 27 Kms tunnel are housed. They are available in 1024 or 1280 pixel sizes and can be downloaded. I will be showing them to my students this week.

If you can read this, you are not affected, but if any friends phone claiming they cannot get online, a possible cause is because this week the FBI that has been maintaining a server with the German authorities as a way to help the many people affected by malware called DNSChanger. They are now pulling the plug, and have been warning that this is going to happen for months, Chris Velazco writes on Tech Crunch. In the article, as well as details about the problem, there is a link to a test service. If you use the link and the display is green, everything is fine; but if it is red, you have only a couple of hours left to clean it up. There are links to help there too. Mine was green of course.

The advent of the blog has meant that many with just a computer and an internet link have been able to set themselves up as experts -- experts in nothing -- by just copying news from other sites (with or without link), reworking the text and proudly putting it up online as "original; mine" when a brief look would show that clearly it is not. Many sites take advantage of the output of others: my podcast and the Cassandra columns are examples. I make sure that any article I use has a link to the original and make comments on the input as opinion. This site also has a lot of original output, such as reviews, some occasional technical input and opinion pieces: all mine for sure.

When MacDaily News highlighted one of my items on the old AMITIAE site on Slow Macs with a brief summary and the URL, I was delighted. However, I have been frustrated when full articles have been lifted and put out with no links on other sites, and pretty annoyed when the ideas I have are reworked apparently to appear as other people's articles.

When writers from other sites have their work lifted, they understandably get upset and MC Siegler appears to have made a point rather forcefully when his work with an error was copied without any checks. The sting in the tail was that when commenting on the way people just lift articles, he left the point open about whether the error he made was deliberate: meant to catch out the xerox bloggers. There are far too many. We can all identify one or two. A brief summary of the state of the MC Siegler story has been written by Alexia Tsotsis who does mention in the article a previous stirring of the pot last October.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.