I like this blog post from the Harvard Business Review.

Control Group has a culture that attracts certain kinds of people. Sure, the culture changes as the company does, but there are certain things that definitely stick from iteration to iteration. I think that our acceptance and interest in innovation is one of them.  I think that we should all be innovating. Everyone has something to contribute, no matter what your title or role is.

So as an FYI, R&D is open to everyone and we will be scheduling more of those drive-bys to accommodate more schedules and interests.

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OS X’s UNIX layer is a wonderful compliment to its excellent GUI. As with any other flavor of UNIX though, there are some peculiarities that can make configuring things frustrating until you know what the rules of engagement are.

I was recently asked to create a reshare of a SAN volume for a client. I selected the file sharing protocol SMB because we can control what permissions are applied to new files and folders. This functionality is especially important since there’s no centralized authentication system to coordinate permissions within this setup. Unfortunately, an apparent bug in the Server Admin GUI for OS X Server 10.6.8 made this goal far more difficult to achieve than just clicking a few options.

The prescribed method for controlling newly created file and folder permissions is to select one of two options for “Default permissions for new files and folders:” under Protocol Options. I wanted all new items to be fully open to everyone, so I selected the option, “Assign as follows:”, and chose “Read & Write” for Owner, Group, and Everyone. A bit of testing showed that this adjustment was ineffective. Everything was still being created with the default permissions of r/w for the owner, read-only for everyone else (i.e., 744 for files, and 755 for folders). Replicating this setup on another server showed that the problem was not unique to the original machine.

Thanks to the aforementioned UNIX layer, I had another way of achieving my goal.

Although it’s found in the same place (/etc/smb.conf) as other UNIX flavors, OS X’s smb.conf file is a unique beast. Note the following comment at the head of the file:

; Parameters inside the required configuration block should not be altered.
; They may be changed at any time by upgrades or other automated processes.
;
; Site-specific customizations will only be preserved if they are done
; outside this block. If you choose to make customizations, it is your
; own responsibility to verify that they work correctly with the supported
; configuration tools.

Scanning through the file showed that there was no entry for the SMB reshare that was currently being served. However, running the command testparm showed that there was indeed a configuration entry for it:

[Volume_Name]
comment = Volume_Name
path = /Volumes/Volume_Name
read only = No
strict locking = Yes

What the heck? Where is this mount coming from? It turns out that OS X Server is pulling share information from an auto-generated file - /var/db/samba/smb.shares. However, we’re clearly not meant to alter this file, as per the leading comment it includes.

The trick is to include our share specific permissions settings at the bottom of /etc/smb.conf under an entry for the volume name. Ergo, you’d add the following:

[Volume_Name]

create mask = 0777
directory mask = 0777
force create mode = 0777
force directory mode = 0777

You’ll obviously want to adjust the included entries and their relative settings to suit your security situation. Also, note that the section name must match the entry listed by testparm for the association to work.

Additionally, I found that I had to include a setting to disable UNIX extensions for everything to work. Your mileage may vary. Rather than edit the untouchable global block, I added another section at the bottom of smb.conf in the following manner:

[global]

unix extensions = no

Curiously, SMB-attached users will see everything as being owned by them, with no access to anyone else:

-rwx——  1 administrator  staff      0 Nov 22 16:46 test_via_smb

Fortunately, this is only for appearances. In reality, new files and folders are being created as specified. Here’s the same file viewed from a fibre attached workstation:

-rwxrwxrwx   1 <uid>            wheel     0 Nov 22 16:46 test_via_smb

Hopefully this bit of knowledge will save someone else some time. Systems administration is ultimately a group effort!

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Bought something at the Apple Store on West 14th Street yesterday and tried the new Apple Store app for self checkout. Launch the app and it recognizes you’re in a store (GPS? SSID? Geo-fencing?). A special interface appears within the app, you click the EasyPay button and take a pic of the barcode on whatever you’re purchasing. Pay with your Apple ID (same as iTunes account) by typing your password. Your receipt appears on screen so a sales rep can give you a “paid” sticker.

Pretty slick. Apple’s got something incredibly powerful with their Apple ID system tied to customer credit card info, and they’re one of the only big players in the space that has both physical and online stores. Amazon’s got this down (duh) but not so much for offline purchasing. Facebook and Google are trying to figure out how to monetize offline purchases too, but seems like they’re playing catch up here.

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If you replaced your runbook with a puppet recipe, spun up a dev environment for breakfast, moved your production infrastructure to AWS, and have a few Arduinos on your desk… we want to talk to you.

Who are we? Just some geeks building the next. next thing and having a blast along the way. We work on dozens of projects every year, using the latest tools and inventing them when they don’t exist yet. We’re super busy creating new infrastructures for our clients, supporting our developers, and working on our own R&D. Your networking, database, storage, cloud, and hardware hacking chops will be challenged and honed.  Since DevOps is an emerging discipline, we’re writing the playbook as we move along.  So we’re looking for someone who lives and breathes this stuff– not necessarily the person with the most experience.

If your interested in joining our team, send us your resume or LinkedIn profile. (GitHub account and OSS contributions will also get our attention!)

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I was reading up on the Nokia Twist prototype yesterday. While the technology is certainly interesting, it’s far from unique. LCD and phone manufacturers have been obsessed for the last couple years with the idea of a bendable display and oftentimes it is also a see through (transparent) display. The advances as far as durability go are pretty cool, but they’re working on non practical tech that is a gimmick at best.

For the same reason the world is mostly shunning the idea of a touch screen monitor, they will likely shun this as well. It drags out the motions needed to complete a task, even simple ones. With the Twist, they mention that you bend the phone towards you to zoom in on a pic, or do other twists and contortions to do things like change music tracks, adjust volume etc. The first and most obvious problem with this is that you need two hands to do pretty much any of this. The “old fashioned” way can more easily be done single handed. It’s like the large touch screen monitors. It’s easier to work with a mouse and keyboard where you can drag files and folders around with the flick of a wrist, rather than extending your arm out to touch an icon, then make a streak across your monitor to drag it from one side to the other.

There will certainly be useful applications for this kind of technology, most likely in the medical field (all crazy cool tech seems to end up there.) Phones will benefit most by using the technology that makes the phone more flexible to prevent shattered screens and broken components. In the end, it’s just another attention grab by Nokia, a company that once dominated the mobile market with an iron fist, has over the last half decade slipped into the role of a curmudgeonly old hermit telling those damn Android kids to get off his lawn.

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We came across a blog post discussing the dichotomy between the minimalist, industrial design of Apple products and the emotional, human design of the software found on those devices.  The writer seemed pretty annoyed by it all.  http://madebymany.com/blog/apples-aesthetic-dichotomy

Our design and user experience team had some strong opinions on the matter. This was our email thread today:

Max Z: This guys makes a couple of very good points (although I don’t agree with his overarching theme). I think the problem is simply one of consistency. Calendar on the iPad looks like its physical counterpart, while Calendar on the iPhone does not. However, Find My Friends is an app that maintains its look on both with leather stitching. Then there’s Game Center, which attempts to hit on a playful theme with a green felt background and serif fonts, while iBooks has fake pages that flick across the screen. This just needs to be fixed.

The part where I don’t agree with him is the tangent he goes on when addressing Apple’s advertising, or regarding Apple’s use of mainstream media in its keynote events. Simply put, people know they’re watching advertising because…. they’re watching a commercial. No one drops their jaw when they realize that Batman is not a documentary of a caped crusader. Same thing goes for using Winnie the Pooh as the first book in an iBooks app.

Ultimately, the author forgets one thing. Apple’s primary target audience is American, and the majority of Americans don’t live in New York or San Francisco. The majority of Americans live in the rest of the country, and they’re not “technorati”, nor do they want to be. They like things that ARE mainstream. At the same time they are also human, so they like things that are pretty, things that feel nice in their hand, and things that are intuitive. In other words, mixing mainstream with unique, beautiful aesthetic is the perfect business strategy. That might just be why they’ve been able to sell a few of their products.

Hams: Another design debate about something Apple is doing?! F yeah, my favorite!

I think another key thing here is something everyone seems to be skipping around, and it’s one of my new favorite big words d bags I mean designers use: Ephemeralization. Apple’s industrial design strategy is different from their product design/development strategy because they both have different challenges and different goals.

Aside from the inconsistency of apps between devices Max outlined so nicely, the author seems to have an issue with the inconsistency in an iPhone’s industrial design and one of the apps on it, iCal. Because we’re designing in a time where our one slick singular device handles our communication, calendar, entertainment, shopping, etc. we have to stick to conventions and maybe even aesthetic cues (for now) that the majority audience easily recognizes from past life versions of each function.

If Apple were designing iCal as a hardware device that served a singular purpose, maybe we’d see a “true-to-calendar” design approach instead of a skeuomorphic take on our multi-functional iPhone. But we are not, because that would involve a hardware case you need to change each time you switch apps.

The industrial designers aren’t designing a calendar device, or a boom box device, or a bookshelf device– they are designing a pocket sized little electronic that takes the place of all these things for you, which requires a totally different design strategy than the utilities named above.

The product designers are designing what the majority audience right now understands as some of these things transformed onto a little screen in their pocket. This will always change and this is the benefit of multi-functional devices being able to update relatively easily. It’s not inconsistent, they are two different things that work together now.

I think the most interesting piece of this whole conversation is what happens when the majority audience doesn’t recognize torn sheets from the calendar anymore but rather this skeuomorphic take on it as their point of reference.

Ivan: It already happened.  My friend teaches elementary school children, and he told me that there’s no succinct  way to describe what the Save button is. This indicates Microsoft’s slavishness to history and precedent to me, whereas Jobs made it a point to do away with the past. (The Icon Garden is a prime example.)

Toby: Actually, folks (Apple users) won’t soon recognize the digital concept of a folder soon, either.
Apple is making a pointed effort to erase the desktop metaphor from computing in order to reify the place these tools have in all parts of our lives. Rather than being misappropriated office tools, they’re lifestyle enablers. Or some shit.
The future is all groups vs folders on Apple platforms. Springboard is the new Finder (and just when Finder was finally sorta working… and written in Cocoa!)

On the tactile metaphors – even though they botch it (book metaphor + scrollbar = puke) – Apple has been telling designers at WWDC and via the HIG and design guides to replicate tactile, real-world, “physical” objects in their designs since the iPhone first came out.

They really push to make the point to designers that the iPhone and iPad (and with Lion, the Mac) don’t exist – they’re just pieces of glass that become different physical objects when an app is launched.

Why they chose to blanket Lion in what appears to be denim is beyond me, though.

Chris R: see what i just did there

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The computer arts and sciences lost another visionary with the recent passing of John McCarthy. Indeed this year seems cursed for the field, with the passing of Dennis Ritchie, father of the C programming language and the operating system UNIX, and Steve Jobs, whose aesthetic and ideological influence on computers drastically reshaped several markets in his too short life.

The effect of these visionaries on how we use computers cannot be overstated. While we encounter the works of great inventors, thinkers, and intellectuals on a daily basis, it is uncommon to have so many of them still alive, as is true with computers. The fact that we are only now losing these people to time speaks to how young this field is, and how quickly it enveloped the world.

I can only imagine that this is what it felt like to be alive in the early part of the last century, when now-legendary people like Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Enrico Fermi, and Werner Heisenberg greatly advanced the study of physics, producing the time honored works that they are now famous for. Singularly their names command respect, but the thought of them working side by side as contemporaries is truly awe-inspiring.

Not to be presumptuous of how history will remember our own times, but I’d wager that school children a century from now will read of the golden era of personal computing and how we created the first public world wide network. To them, a world without such advances would seem inconceivable, but we ourselves are witness to the times and people that pushed the state of the art. I am simply glad to be along for the ride.

– Ivan Wright, Server Engineer

A. Piccard, E. Henriot, P. Ehrenfest, Ed. Herzen, Th. De Donder, E. Schrödinger, J.E. Verschaffelt, W. Pauli,W. Heisenberg, R.H. Fowler, L. Brillouin;
P. Debye, M. Knudsen, W.L. Bragg, H.A. Kramers, P.A.M. Dirac, A.H. Compton, L. de Broglie, M. Born, N. Bohr;
I. Langmuir, M. Planck, M. Curie, H.A. Lorentz, A. Einstein, P. Langevin, Ch. E. Guye, C.T.R. Wilson, O.W. Richardson

(Photo Source: bit.ly/sQ2Eph)

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UX designer Kurtis Powers moonlights as an executive soccer fan.  As head of Arsenal America’s NYC branch, he organizes events for  400 active supporters around the city.

This past weekend Kurtis organized a day of “Gooner” ink at Three Kings Tattoo that left over 140 people with AFC tattoos.  At least 10 people received their first tattoo that day.  Now that’s dedication!

See Complex Magazine’s coverage of the event:

http://www.complex.com/art-design/2011/10/alex-mcwatt-inks-125-years-of-tradition-at-arsenal-tattoo-event

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We love what we do.  So much so that we work on pet projects together outside of the normal course of business.

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I found Sholom drilling aluminum USB cases at 8:45am this morning. Those are some pretty rad flame goggles.

Power drilling at 8am

flame goggles

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