The first iteration of AppleTV was a flop. About the only thing it was good for was linking your TV/Entertainment center to your Mac, and there were many cheaper solutions already on the market for playing your iTunes playlists on your stereo. Fast forward to Wednesday’s much anticipated announcement. Many predicted we would see a new AppleTV, and there was a collective intake of breath as we saw the famous “One More Thing” but the excitement soon faded as Steve unveiled Apple’s vision.

The new version of AppleTV is smaller and there are a couple of new features, but it doesn’t do anything that isn’t already available by another manufacturer with one exception. You can push content from your iPad to your TV. Apple at least understands we want all of our devices to be connected, but they do not appear to understand much more than that. Perhaps they do not know about Roku, Boxee Box, that Youtube is testing movie rentals, or that we already get Netflix through our game consoles. However, despite this lapse in judgment I do believe Apple has the pieces to make AppleTV a compelling product.

AppleTV needs to be based on iOS so it can bring the App Model to our TVs. For too long we have been slaves to the Cable and Satellite companies and their over priced packages. It doesn’t make sense to purchase a package of 50 channels you don’t want to get the one channel you do want. Let the content creators sell Apps or partner with websites like Hulu to publish their content. I would be much more open to buying an HBO app directly from HBO or even subscribing for $15 a month instead of paying a cable company $40 a month. Plus the App could allow you to access the content at anytime, from anywhere. Allow consumers to use the internet connection they already have to consume the content instead of paying another company $60 to $120+ for another connection to watch 3-4 shows.

I believe the future of media consumption is a la carte and the app model is the easiest way to implement that. Sure it would have been a big risk to introduce such a revolutionary concept into the world, and Apple would have no doubt made enemies. But Apple has built a company on taking bold steps and being leaders in the industry not followers. Of course the Cable and Satellite companies are going to fight it. They have said all along why they do not want to sell bandwidth, but in the end we as consumers want more control over our digital media.

I think Apple missed a golden opportunity to once again revolutionize a product we all have in our house, and in doing so may have just handed this product to Google. Google has already announced that their GoogleTV coming sometime this Fall will be based on Android and will indeed run Apps. Just in time to help us forget we got excited about what AppleTV could have been.

Yes the new iPhone has an antenna issue but other than a few people with bullhorns hyping it there seems to be a lot of chatter that the issue is really no big deal. The phone still performs better in terms of drop calls except when you are in an area with poor signal. And what do people really expect Apple to do? The only real fix would be to redesign the phone. I don’t see Apple doing that. Perhaps they cave and give out free bumpers, but I don’t see them recalling the phones. Instead they are going to send out an update to the bogus algorithm they have been using to display the signal strength. How about that? Come to find out, Apple was gaming the system to make signal look better. Perhaps that’s why I could drop calls on my 3g with 5 bars showing. And yet, given we were truly misled in that area no one seems to be up in arms over that.

I think Apple needs to make it right, but at the same time I think there duty is only to the people who have an issue. Clearly not everyone has an issue, so a recall seems like a waste. We are not talking about a fire hazard, or threat to life or property. We are talking about an antenna that when you touch it, the signal is effected. Sorry, but that happens on all antennas. Its one of the side effects when using radios.

One of the things OS X shares with with Linux is the file system, particularly how files and directories are handled. In this case, I talking about how hidden files are handled. By default files or directories that begin with a . (period) are hidden from view. And while for most that is the best option, there are times you need to work with the hidden files and directories in Finder.

The easiest way to do unhide these files is from the command line. To do so, you simply open terminal and run:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles True

You then need to reset Finder so that the change can take effect. To do that type this:

killall Finder

Viola! You can now see a lot more files. However, typing that in every time you want to see the files is a pain, so lets make that process easier.

To do that we are going to take advantage of something those familiar with Linux/Unix will already be fans of. Aliases.

Since your files are unhidden at this point you can either open up finder to your directory at /users/username or you can do this from the command line. In Finder, just right click on the file .profile and open it with the text editor. From the command line do:

nano .profile

Ok, under the line export PS1=”$ ” we are going to add the following two lines:

alias unhide="defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles True; killall Finder"
alias hide="defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles False; killall Finder"

Close out terminal, and restart it. This will read your new aliases and load them. Basically what we have done is a create a new command, or if you will a shortcut. Every time you type unhide or hide and press enter, everything in ” ” will run just as if you type it all out. For the sake of consolidating I added ;killall Finder to the end of the original command so that it will run as soon as the first part is finished eliminating the need to run type it as well.

There you go, you can unhide and hide the hidden files with a simple command.

When I decided to setup a local Subversion server, I found that while there was several guides on how to do it, not one completely got me going. What follows is what worked for me. While it may not be 100% complete for you, I hope it does help point you in the right direction.

For this guide I am using Ubuntu 8.04 LTS as my server. This guide assumes you have at least a good working knoweldge of Ubuntu, Linux, and are not afraid of the command line. With that in mind, let’s get going.

First off we need to install Subversion.

sudo apt-get install subversion libapache2-svn

Once that has completed we should be able to create our repository. Personally I installed my at /svnrepos/project

sudo svnadmin create /path/to/repos/project

Next you will want to setup the permissions on the repos you just created. First setup your login to the repo.

sudo nano /path-to-repos/project/conf/passwd

At the end of the file add the a line in the format as the examples show in the file. = For example:

jeff = password

Personally I use the same login name I typically use the same username my linux user account is on the box. Next you need to edit the conf file.

sudo nano /path-to-repos/project/conf/svnserve.conf

Here we want to uncomment 3 lines and edit one so they are like this:

anon-access = none
auth-access = write
password-db = passwd

There is of course more options in the terms of security and such, but these basic settings will get you up and running.

Now we need to start the server.

sudo svnserve -d -r /path-to-repos

After that we can now import our files. There is a couple of ways to do this. If you are doing this from the server where subversion is installed, you can use this command to import:

sudo svn import /path-to-local-directory file:///path-to-repos/project --username username

You should be promoted to enter the password you designated in the passwd file above.

If you are doing this remotely from a linux machine you can use this command:

sudo svn import /path-to-local-directory svn://svnserver/project --username username

And if you want to upload your repo from a windows machine, you will need a subversion client. I use sliksvn. From the command line I use the following to import:

c:\> svn import -m "project" --force-log path-to-local-files svn://svnserver/project --username username

After that, you are ready to go. To check out a project:

svn co svn://svnserver/project /local-project-folder --username username

To commit the changes:

svn commit -m "Saving Changes" /local-project-folder

There is a lot more to Subversion, but I hope that this guide has helped you your own copy up and running.