Author: Rob Fahrni

Husband / Father / Developer

Categories
Apple Development iOS

Apple Developer Center Breach

Full text of the email every registered Apple Developer received.

“Apple Developer Website Update

Last Thursday, an intruder attempted to secure personal information of our registered developers from our developer website. Sensitive personal information was encrypted and cannot be accessed, however, we have not been able to rule out the possibility that some developers’ names, mailing addresses, and/or email addresses may have been accessed. In the spirit of transparency, we want to inform you of the issue. We took the site down immediately on Thursday and have been working around the clock since then.

In order to prevent a security threat like this from happening again, we’re completely overhauling our developer systems, updating our server software, and rebuilding our entire database. We apologize for the significant inconvenience that our downtime has caused you and we expect to have the developer website up again soon.”

I know people love a good scandal, and being breached is a decent story, but nothing sensitive was compromised. It’s a major bummer they were hacked, but as far as the developer community is aware no app keys or credentials were stolen. No, our apps won’t have to be resigned and resubmitted.

Categories
Design fun

Facebook to buy Dropbox

That’s right, I’m calling it. Facebook will acquire Dropbox in the very near future. How do I know this? History is on my side.

Designer Tim Van Damme has a unique superpower. His companies are acquired by Facebook. He was with Gowalla when they were acquired by Facebook, so he left for Instagram. Not long after Van Damme arrived at Instagram, that’s right, you guessed it, they were acquired by Facebook.

The first thing I thought yesterday when I read Mr. Van Damme was leaving Instagram for Dropbox? “I wonder when Facebook will acquire them?”

Has anyone set the line?

Categories
Cloud

The Advantage of App.Net

Steve Streza: “One other cool benefit of using App.net for the backend is that the data specification is publicly available. This means other developers could build apps that recognize your journal. So, if the developer of your favorite camera app adds support for Ohai journals, they could save those photos into your journal. Then, the next time you open Ohai, those photos are available. Other developers could build journaling apps for other platforms like Android, or even write competitive apps for iPhone. You as the user would not have to export your data and re-import it; it would just all appear when you logged in. It’s a wonderful deal for customers to have no lock-in at all, with open data standards for interoperability.”

Ohai, Steve’s new app, is an app for keeping track of life moments. Similar to Vesper, from Q Branch, but this application has storage in the magical cloud. Not only does it make use of cloud technologies it’s using App.Net to do it. I think this is important because most people think of App.Net as a Twitter clone. It’s way more than that. It’s a set of API’s and infrastructure that allow people to build deeply connected applications. App.Net, the social network, is one example of the infrastructure and API’s. Ohai is another. Steve even points out that others could create other applications that can have access to the data. Why? Well, it’s your data. You decide who gets to see it.

Very cool app.

Categories
Uncategorized

Blockbuster Death Watch

Forbes: “But at such a high cost, with little evidence that the project would connect with audiences to justify it, a $220- $250 million Lone Ranger will now struggle to break even if it does the unlikely and crosses $400 million worldwide.”

This is a bit frightening if you’re a fan of movies. A few weeks back Steven Spielberg warned how close Hollywood is to collapse.

“That’s the big danger, and there’s eventually going to be an implosion — or a big meltdown. There’s going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen megabudget movies are going to go crashing into the ground, and that’s going to change the paradigm.”

I hope this doesn’t happen, but to read an article outlining how a $250 million film is a flop is a bit of a drag.

Categories
Life Sports

Form vs. Function

Categories
#twitter Social

Twitter as a Service

Not an official Twitter logo, just a cute bird with a sign.High Scalability: “Twitter no longer wants to be a web app. Twitter wants to be a set of APIs that power mobile clients worldwide, acting as one of the largest real-time event busses on the planet.”

How can you do that and limit developers to 100,000 tokens? It doesn’t make sense.

Categories
Life

Happy Independence Day

Signing the Declaration of Independence

Traitors all. Long live the traitors.

Categories
Life

Small Cities

The Atlantic, Cities: “People would live in small city clusters built around a town center replete with stores, offices, schools, public buildings, and parks. Traveling around town, residents would take the “light” road network. They would walk, bike, or drive tiny cars incapable of exceeded 25 mph. There would be no on-street parking at all. The general idea is to promote interaction and accessibility.”

I really love this idea. We live in a neighborhood where our homes are tightly packed, and I like it. From the outside it looks like a really nice apartment complex. We have a two community pools, tennis courts, and a basketball court. After we lived here a couple months I mentioned to Kim how I wish we had a little convenience store in the neighborhood, something simple, just the basics; a meat counter, fruits and veggies, dairy, and some very basic household items. I remember back to my childhood in Lindsay, California. We had a little corner store in our neighborhood, Linwood Market, that was exactly what I described. When we’d play baseball in the street on a hot summer day the group of boys I hung out with would often pool our money, look for bottles to redeem, and head to the market to buy a six pack of root beer or sarsaparilla to quench our thirst. Yes, very reminiscent of The Sandlot.

I think society could use more neighborly neighborhoods. Having a small, self sustaining, community could help, I think. If something like this sprung up in the valley I’d be very interested in checking it out.

Categories
#twitter Development Social

Origins of the word Tweet

Ollie! The Twitterrific BirdCraig Hockenberry: “Work was proceeding at a very fast pace during the first week of January 2007. Beta releases were frequent and widely distributed. Fortunately, the folks at Twitter were using our app with it’s snazzy new bird icon. One of our beta testers was an API engineer named Blaine Cook who sent me the following email:”

The word “tweet” was suggested by a Twitter engineer, but not used by Twitter for a very long time. The word was first used in Twitterrific. What a groundbreaking Twitter client. So much so people still think Ollie is the official Twitter logo. Whoops.

Categories
Apple

The new Mac Pro is a Beast

WWDC 2013tGuy English: “There’s only one CPU socket and it bets heavily on the bus and GPU performance. While this looks to software to be just another Mac, it isn’t. It’s capabilities aren’t traditional. The CPU is a front end to a couple of very capable massively parallel processors at the end of a relatively fast bus. One of those GPUs isn’t even hooked up to do graphics. I think that’s a serious tell. If you leverage your massively parallel GPU to run a computation that runs even one second and in that time you can’t update your screen, that’s a problem. Have one GPU dedicated to rendering and a second available for serious computation and you’ve got an architecture that’ll feel incredible to work with.”

At my day job I work on an SDK that allows people to embed video in their applications. The SDK lives on an awesome framework developed by our Systems team that is portable and allows us to create plugins that can process media and push it down the pipeline. That pipeline includes plugins to receive data from the network, decode that data, time it, and render it to a portion of a display. It can do this for live and recorded video, MPEG4, H.264, and even low frame rate JPEG video (so we don’t have to decode frames on the client.) But, I digress. If you notice, I mentioned decoding. We’ve looked at decoding with hardware but it’s actually quite expensive to push encoded frames across the bus, decode them, push them back across the bus, and finally render it, which pushes it back across the bus. Ick.

At one time Pelco had built its own combo card that could decode video and render to the display with a single push across the bus. That was a cool piece of hardware. At the time we could decode and display sixteen separate video streams simultaneously, at varying frame rates. That card was extremely underpowered. I guess what I’m getting at is this: How cool would it be to leverage one GPU on a Mac Pro for decoding all video, be it one stream or sixteen, and push the results across to the secondary GPU for rendering, without a transfer back across the bus to main memory? The idea of it seems very exciting.

Now all we need to do is build our pipeline for Mac OSX(totally doable) and create a new decode/render plugin that takes advantage of the new GPU. I’m not sure if its totally possible, without multiple bus transfers, but it would be fun to try.