The Twittersphere is going crazy over the new iPhone Pwnage 2.0 tool and lots of people are getting the “Failed to enter DFU mode” error. The solution to this is to open a terminal and run:

mkdir ~/Library/iTunes/”Device Support”

And then Pwnage should run happily.

I just came across this boneheaded blog post about Google’s newly open-sourced Protocol Buffers:

They claim they could not use XML because ‘it isn’t going to be efficient enough for this scale’. WTF??? If this statement came from someone else, I would understand, but these guys are supposed to KNOW markup.

Speed in a system in [sic] NOT just optimizing loops in code! It is the architecture: messaging, storage, and re-use. Yes, XML can be fat, but so can any other language. And if they took the time to improve the processing libraries instead of creating their own special methods, we would ALL benefit on projects that used XML, not just this so-called ‘protocol’.

And he had the audacity to title the post Google hates XML.

Toward the end of my time at Novell, I was looking into a browser sync system for the GNOME Online Desktop. As I am a lazy hacker, the ideal solution at the time for me would have been for Google to open source its nice browser sync extension and then adapt it to the online desktop myself. I tapped my contacts inside Google to see if open sourcing it was in the cards. It wasn’t.

When I saw that the extension was being discontinued (and slowly-but-surely being replaced by Mozilla Labs’ Weave) and that it wasn’t immediately open sourced, I was furious! I planned a blog entry raking them over the coals, how could they abandon a perfectly useful piece of code, blah blah blah. It never happened, because I suck at blogging (remember, me=lazy).