On Intuit’s acquisition of Mint

Jason Fried’s closing thoughts on the Mint acquisition:

Thomas Jefferson said “Periodic revolution, ‘at least once every 20 years,’ was ‘a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.’” That may be even truer for business. We need new blood, new companies, new methods, new ideas, new applications, and new leaders to regenerate stale industries. The old must be plowed under by the new.

But today it seems like the old is doing the plowing. Let’s stop that. Let’s build great companies that are here to fight, here to win, and here to stay until the next generation after us comes along and kicks all our asses. And again and again and again. That’s how better happens.

DAMN RIGHT! We must take the fight to them. This is how we advance the state of the art and foster innovation.

Verizon FiOS, MacBook Pros, and Self-Assigned IP Addresses

If you’ve had difficulties connecting your MacBook Pro to a Verizon FiOS wireless router, read on.

When connecting to the FiOS wireless router, I can see the access point, enter the password, and it appears to connect to the network.

Except the router doesn’t assign the MacBook Pro an IP address and self-assigns itself one. Even manually entering the address in the 192.168.1.x/24 block, subnet mask, and default gateway address doesn’t work.

Through trial and hour for the past few hours, the key is that the password is case-sensitive. I had initially entered the password in lowercase letters. Without much luck, I deleted the password stored in the keychain, and tried again. But this time, I entered the same key in UPPERCASE.

It was beautiful.

iPhone OS 3.0 Acid3 Test 97%

Almost there. Just playing with the new iPhone 3G S before heading to dinner and was curious as to Mobile Safari’s standards compliance.

This thing kicks ass!

On the lack of Firewire on unibody MacBooks

After some quick research, I’ve concluded that the lack of Firewire on the unibody MacBook is totally inconsistent with other Macs that are available for less.

A potential reason for omitting Firewire is cost. If this is the case, then I have only one question: why is it that Firewire is still a standard feature on the new Mac Minis starting at $599, AND even the updated white MacBook with the 9400M GPU that sells for $999? Ouch.

That and Firewire has nice benefits such as target disk mode for easily mounting the disk for recovery, being able to carry more power for self-powered devices, TCP/IP networking, and smoking USB 2.0 because it’s still CPU dependent, while Firewire is handled by a dedicated controller.

This is not good.

Update – 8 June 2009: Firewire once again STANDARD on all Apple portables except the MacBook Air. YES!

Not sure if Target Disk Mode (TDM) will be offered though. It would be madness not to.

The Mechanical Universe and Beyond

The Mechanical Universe and Beyond (free-sign up required)

This is another great gem on the Interwebs for anyone wanting to learn about Physics. I remember watching only 1 or 2 episodes of this series back in high school Physics class. I’m almost done with it now and it’s been really fun and nostalgic, though I was only 4-5 years old at the time it was made. Considering it was made in the 80s, the CGI was pretty sophisticated for its day as the graphics were produced by Dr. James Blinn, who worked at JPL and is now a fellow at Microsoft Research.

As for Dr. David Goodstein, who produced and hosts the series, he’s still teaching at CalTech, and has come out with books in recent years on oil consumption and how much oil there’s left in the earth. By his calculations, we’ve used half of 2 trillion barrels of oil in existence with production to decline as we’re at peak oil stages with terminal decline in production.

In one YouTube, I recall him saying that burning deuterium from sea water could be a clean way of generating sustainable energy.

Lots of ideas to write about and I’m hoping that I can spend more time turning them into essays.

VMware Fusion 2.0 + Counterstrike = Yes!

This is a moment I’ve been waiting for, for the past the several years. Finally, I can play Counterstrike in an XP VM with VMware Fusion 2.0. Give it a shot and you’ll be impressed. Just be sure to change the renderer in Counterstrike to Direct3D. The framerates are pretty decent too, but I forgot the console command to show fps. I’ll Google the command and post an update.

One small downside is that keeps the fan in my MacBook Pro running when playing. No biggy, I’ll probably get used to it.

Update, 24 Nov 2008: The solution can be found in an old version of VMware Fusion’s Release Notes. Add ‘vmmouse.present = “FALSE” ‘ to the end of the VM’s .vmx file, and also modify Fusion’s preference file in your home directory. Keep in mind that you will lose the ability to seamlessly go back and forth from the VM to OS X, but this was a great find!

Some thoughts of the day

John Gruber hits a bullseye in regard to Microsoft’s latest PR campaign.

Under the Bush Administration, the national debt has grown by more than $4 trillion.

Fed bailouts of Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns, AIG, et al. show that we are a communist country. Look elsewhere for free market capitalism.

Some words to describe the two major parties: socialism, fascism, demagoguery, interventionism, jingoism

I won’t be voting for a major party candidate in the general election. Dumb and dumber.

M_Ca_n? Republican?

Maybe we all deserve to walk the road to serfdom?

Connecting to Citrix with the OS X ICA Client

Our company doesn’t have many mobile users (people with laptops), and due to the sensitive nature of the business we’re in, and in an effort to mitigate the potential for data leakage, we’re gradually making the switch to using Citrix technology.

Once we’re logged into our Citrix gateway, we can launch a published application such as Remote Desktop Connection to then RDP into our workstations at the office.

While the process for connecting to Citrix is straightforward for both Windows and Mac clients, there are some additional steps that Mac users must take in order to successfully connect to the company network.

While the process is relatively straightforward and is simply a matter of installing the ICA client, authenticating to the access gateway, and running RDP, Mac users will have to first manually import the CA root certificate from where the server’s SSL certificate originated into the ICA client. Otherwise, you’ll get an Error 183 from the ICA Client indicating that:

SSL Error 0: You have chosen not to trust “”, the issuer of the server’s security certificate.
Error Number: 183

Here are some general steps that need to taken in order for the connection to be successful:

1. When accessing the access gateway, an warning appears stating that the certificate cannot be trust. Go ahead and trust (accept) the security certificate.
2. Open Keychain Access, and double-click the certificate of the access gateway to inspect it.
3. Scroll towards the bottom and look for a hyperlink to the CA’s certificate with a .crt extension.
4. The certificate will then be your downloads folder.
5. Make sure the certificate has a .crt extension. If not, change it to this extension.
6. Go to the Applications folder and find the folder for the Citrix ICA Client.
7. Inside this folder, create another folder called “keystore”.
8. Inside the keystore folder, make another one called “cacerts”
9. Move the certificate file that was downloaded into the “cacerts” subdirectory.
10. Close your browser, restart it, log-in to the access gateway and attempt to access one of the published applications.
11. The ICA client will start and should present the chosen application without any errors.

Let me know how your Citrix experiences on the Mac are. I admit, it’s kind of weird to see a Windows-type window overlayed on top of OS X.

Long days to keep me out of trouble

Steveo thought I should write something as I haven’t updated the blog recently.

A few weeks ago, I started a new job working for a Hedge Fund in the Financial District and it’s been a VERY different change of pace in terms of the commitment made to the position and the hours worked. I’ve always enjoyed new challenges, and this has definitely been one of them.

The hours are long, demanding, and has required something of me that I was never really concerned about before.

And that is the need to develop a routine, or regularity in one’s life.

Throughout high school and college (and even prior to high school), I never followed a routine, which in retrospect, probably did more harm than it did good. Sleeping in a lot Freshman year of college probably wasn’t the best way to enjoy the college experience.

But so far, the job’s been great and I’ve learned a lot in 2 weeks. It boggles my mind to see Quants and traders looking at 8 LCD screens with numbers blinking green and red in real-time, while continuously looking at graphs with their multiple trend lines. Adding to that is watching like a hawk the latest news and developments on their Bloomberg terminal (a $1,500/mo. service PER user!) to plot their trading strategies.

While the day starts at 7a and ends at 6 or 7p, the fast-paced nature of the business makes time go really fast, which is definitely a good thing.

Gmail signatures bug with Safari

Here’s a head’s up for anyone using signatures in Safari.

If you have a signature that’s automatically appended to your e-mail defined in Gmail, and try to either change or remove it completely, the changes won’t be saved. This can be tested by creating a new e-mail and noticing that the signature in the blank e-mail hasn’t changed at all. This was observed in Safari 3.1.1.

Alternatively, Firefox appears to handle the signature changes correctly.