Toni Schneider of Automattic share’s with us some good thoughts on Open APIs vs Open Source. In a nutshell: Open Source decentralizes software development, Open APIs decentralize business development.
Monthly Archive for January, 2007
In the process of reinstalling the operating system on my horrible phone, I’ve made a few backups of my phone’s memory on my computer. I was just poking through one of them and discovered 3 mysterious recordings, probably made by accidentally holding down one of the buttons at some point, putting it into “quick voice memo” mode. I present these recordings here for your enjoyment:
Someone has created a key which opens all Diebold voting machines, using only an image of the key from the company’s own website. link
I hate my MDA that I got a few months ago. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say my problems are mostly to with Windows mobile. I can’t sync with my address book and calendar properly, every part of using the system is frustrating and buggy, and I have to wipe the phone for one reason or another every couple months. And the hardware ain’t so hot either– the sound quality leaves much to be desired.
So I am potentially in the market for a new phone. Forget about the Apple iPhone for now… I can’t stand to use this thing until June.
Here are the features I must have:
- Good sound quality
- A qwerty or faux-qwerty keyboard
- A good web browser
- Excellent synchronization with OS X Address Book and iCal
- Easy and relatively reliably internet OS X tethering over Bluetooth
Here are the features I would like to have:
- 802.11x
- Full use of the bluetooth spec
- More than a paltry 64 or 128 megs of built-in storage
- Supported and seamless internet tethering with OS X
- GPS (i know, now i’m dreaming)
As far as I know, I think my only options are either a Symbian phone (maybe needing to get a non-us model), or the BlackBerry Pearl.
Anyone have any other ideas? Let’s pretend that price is no object.
I’m throwing together a little WordPress plugin which recommends to readers who are using IE that they switch to Firefox.
I’ve been racking my brain for verbiage that is informative, honest, and to the point, but also doesn’t come off as arrogant. I think I have failed:
heh heh. No seriously though, does anyone have any recommendations for the phrasing?
It's too bad that ON (column = column) comes after and not before INNER JOIN table, because if it came before it would make for much cuter code formatting:
SQL:
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SELECT DISTINCT $columns
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FROM
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$this->comments
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ON (comment_post_ID = post_id) INNER JOIN
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$this->post2cat
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ON (category_id = cat_ID) INNER JOIN
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$this->categories
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WHERE
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blog = '$blog' AND
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$criteria
5:29:34 PM earnestedward: vonage is great
5:29:41 PM earnestedward: 6 cents a minute for calls to hollard
5:29:42 PM earnestedward: holland
5:29:46 PM johnjosephbachir: nice
5:30:03 PM earnestedward: and i can initiate calls from the website
5:30:10 PM earnestedward: so if i want to call the house
5:30:16 PM earnestedward: i don't have to call them and ask them to call me back
5:30:19 PM johnjosephbachir: haha
5:30:20 PM johnjosephbachir: nice!
5:30:23 PM earnestedward: yeah
5:30:31 PM earnestedward: i hope i have internet in my dorm
5:30:32 PM johnjosephbachir: you press a button and both ends ring?
5:30:36 PM earnestedward: yeah
5:30:38 PM johnjosephbachir: wow
5:30:41 PM johnjosephbachir: that is innovation
5:30:56 PM johnjosephbachir: that's what happens when you aren't trapped in the telephone system and can innovate at the ends
5:31:02 PM earnestedward: no doubt
5:31:11 PM earnestedward: it's digital baby
Arrrrre you readyyyyy--- for an es Q elllllllll--- CHALLENGE!!!!!
I have a user table, let's say with name and zipcode. I can do the following successfully:
- Select a random user with
SELECT * FROM users ORDER BY RAND(UNIX_TIMESTAMP()) LIMIT 1 - Select all users, with only 1 from each zipcode, using
SELECT * FROM users GROUP BY zipcodeupdate: I simplified this as per Danny's suggestion below
The only problem is, in case 2, it's always the same user per-zipcode. I want to randomize which in the grouping gets pulled out. I would prefer that the solution not involve joining the table on itself, although if I don't find another solution I will probably whip up the self-join solution just for fun.
Billions of civilization citizens ask of content distributors:
Why should we purchase music/movies/television/software when we can download/share it for free?
Content distributors have two answers:
- Because downloading/sharing content is Wrong.
- We have no answer, so we are going to remove the download/share option by introducting DRM into every single playback device.
ibiblio colleague and systems guru John Mills writes:
So, I remember you had a cute backup script for OS X. Well I have an external USB drive, which I don't want active all the time. My script runs from a cronjob, and automatically mounts and unmounts the external drive, and uses rsync to copy the files.
Here's the script, called backup.sh:
BASH:
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#! /bin/bash
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# Definitions
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DISK=disk1s1
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DIR_NAME=jonmills
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SOURCE=/Users/${DIR_NAME}/
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DEST=/Volumes/Backup/${DIR_NAME}/
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EXCLUDE=/var/log/backup/excludes.${DIR_NAME}
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# Mount a disk by hand with disktool
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/usr/sbin/disktool -m ${DISK}
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# Wait for the disk to spin up, or else this won't work
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sleep 10
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# Copy the files with rsync
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/usr/bin/rsync -av \
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--delete \
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--delete-excluded \
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--exclude-from=${EXCLUDE} \
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${SOURCE} \
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${DEST}
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# Unmount the disk manually with disktool
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/usr/sbin/disktool -u ${DISK}
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crontab looks like this:
CODE:
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#
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# min hour mday month wday command</code>
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# Run the script at 4:30 AM and mail me the log
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30 4 * * * ~/.backup.sh 2>&1 | mail -s "Backup Log - `date`" _____@gmail.com
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