I use vi/vim though. And no, I’m not included in the group of vi users that are younger than vi. 🙂

.. Or should I just say Apple’s Strategy?

None of the following is new, but I just feel I want to share my opinion with the world about this.

The latest news about the iPhone’s internationalization is the pure result of Apple’s “closed” marketing strategy, or should I say karma to make a profit?

There has been a lot of controversy about the iPhone, for instance China’s telecoms do not support “locked SIMs”, and there was a rival war between Vodafone and T-Mobile in Germany for the release of the iPhone. As some of you may recall, a few months ago, there were also problems with French law which prohibits locked phones. All of this is a direct result of Apple’s “closed” strategy to make a profit. Is Apple becoming like Microsoft as it gains popularity? Well, we all know the answer.

Most of us, or “geeks with Macs”, came from a Linux background or from an Open Source background. Whether we want it or not, Apple’s “closed” strategy is against our nature, period. We are just too blind or we just want to be blind to admit that because Macs are cool and because MacOSX is cool (it’s Unix and it provides you with an experience you were not used to using Linux on a desktop).

Although I wanted to be blind with Apple’s MacOSX strategy, I can’t be blind with their strategy for the iPhone. I am a happy iPhone user (product-wise), but I am unhappy with their “closed” strategy. I am glad that they are releasing the SDK for iPhone in February, but they should have done that in the beginning instead of sending out lame excuses for not providing such openness in their product. Their closed/arrogant/$$$$$/control freak attitude is still there. They only decided to release SDK because they were forced to do so, not because they are cool and believe in openness.

Meanwhile, and since I’m talking about it, a bigger giant than Apple released android with a completely different attitude. Open for everyone! hack hack hack! experiment, develop, do whatever you want to, “I even give you money for doing so” -type-of-attitude ($10M).

Android is there, soon in a phone next to you. It’s open and it’s cool and Apple will see the impact of their first choice soon, even though they have the best phone on earth (so far).

I don’t foresee shining days for Apple as I used to see in the past and if they don’t change their strategy (maybe they’re starting to change it with the release of iPhone’s SDK), I would not be surprised if another giant does something on top of Linux as they did on top of FreeBSD and I am pretty sure that they will kick Apple where it hurts.

After the open letter from Steve Jobs announcing a $100 rebate to everyone that bought an iPhone prior to the price dump, here are the instructions on how to get the rebate.

Basically, you need to provide your AT&T phone number and the iPhone’s serial number, then you’ll get a code (electronic store credit) that you can use at the Apple Retail Store or the Apple Online Store.

Read more about iPhone:

I don’t know anyone that uses the iDisk functionality from .mac and likes it.

Everyone complains that it’s wayyy too slow, including me. It even makes your computer to “run slower” (whenever you open Finder for instance). It’s easy to understand why it makes your computer run slower: iDisk is a remote drive. Even if you use the iDisk syncing capabilities it’s still slow, since it tries to connect to .mac frequently for synchronizing.

The solution is simple: Make your own version of iDisk and use a faster server than .mac’s. I personally don’t like the idea of having a remote drive, I prefer to have a local directory and synchronize it with my server instead. Just for the record, I have a server always connected to the internet and 3 other computers that I need to sync with. I change files from that directory on all the computers and I want all the computers to be synced.

One year ago I was looking for this type of solution and back then, the best thing I found was rsyncbackup. It works fine except that if you delete a file in one of the computers it doesn’t get deleted on all the other ones. It actually appears again on the server that you just deleted from, after a sync. Since I usually don’t need to delete files from that directory this solution worked fine and I never researched again to find a better one.

Last week there was a thread on Slashdot about this. I liked two of the solutions presented there (or at least these two caught my eye):

• Dropbox (screencast here)
• Unison

Although Dropbox looks promising, I like to control my own stuff so I decided to install Unison. For short, it works perfectly. It does everything I need and it doesn’t have the problem I have with rsyncbackup. It does the job efficiently and it’s very flexible. You have a lot of different options for what to do in case of a conflict.

The installation and configuration is really simple. Just follow these steps (start with the client or read step 5):

1. If you have macports installed, just execute port install unison. If not, download it from the site and install it.
2. If you used macports, then create the file ~/Library/Application\ Support/Unison/mydisk.prf with your settings. Since I like learning by example here’s an example that I created for you.
3. To sync just run: unison mydisk -silent in one of the client computers. (-silent to not output anything to stdout)
4. Add a cron to run it every hour. If you’re running Linux you might want to take a look at incron.
5. Run the steps 1 through 4 on every computer you want to synchronize. When installing the server you only need the step 1.

Have fun!