Dirkus Maximus

OK, now that I’ve got just about everything on the site put back together, let’s have an update on that nasty AT&T business, shall we?

So, I finally received my iPhone, three weeks after I ordered it. Wes’s phone rolled in 3 days after that. My iPhone case rolled in about 3 days more after that.

AT&T did make some concessions after all the crap and misinformation that we received. They’re giving us 2 months free, plus 1000 rollover minutes, plus that $24 back that I was overcharged.

The ECO iPhone case that AT&T sells does NOT fit the iPhone. It’s WAY too tight. Also, don’t be fooled, there’s no belt loop on the back. It’s just a slip cover. I ended up giving it to Wes for her iPod touch instead. Trying to squeeze the iPhone in and out of there was a hell of a chore, but the iPod Touch fits just right.

Wes is “Okay” with her phone overall. I need to get a microSD card so I can save some custome ringtones to it for her, but overall she seems to like it well enough. She really hasn’t said much about it. I think she’s just still steamed at AT&T for their bullshit.

So how about that iPhone? I’d give it 4 stars out of 5. The flexibility is awesome. The apps are great. The user interface is the standard by which all other phones should be judged. There’s just some nagging things that kinda irk me.

The compass in the 3Gs is pretty much useless in a car, or near anything made of metal. When it’s working, it’s GREAT. When it’s not, it’ll do strange things like show you going the opposite direction of reality on a street, or show the map skewed by 90 degrees.

The phone has frozen up on me a few times. Two or three times while “sleeping”, and occasionally after running a app that uses a lot of graphics or a “heavy” web page.

There are some odd compatibility bugs with some apps. Palringo, for instance. Palringo works just fine on Wes’s 1st gen touch, but refused to pop up push notifications on my iPhone and would scramble conversations from multiple users.

The YouTube upload function of the camera has two stupid bugs; 1) if the phone goes to sleep while uploading, it kills the upload. 2) it always defaults to categorizing videos as “comedy”. This doesn’t even make sense. It *should* remember whatever the last selected category is, and use that. It would be understandable if it defaulted to the first item in the list. Comedy is the second item on the list though, why the hell does it default to that?

There should be a way to actually hide icons you don’t plan on using, aside from just banishing them to the last page of app icons.

The antenna in the 3Gs sucks. Lance has a 3G, and he regularly gets 4 bars and 3G at his desk, right next to mine. I get 2 bars, maybe, and edge. Sometimes shutting down and restarting the phone helps, but most of the time it’s just got crap for reception.

The camera lacks any kind of controls. Even my wife’s old Virgin Mobile phone AND her new Motorola free-phone have neat functions like exposure compensation and preset white balance settings. Not having that in this phone is STUPID, especially seeing as those are strictly software driven items. You put hundreds of thousands of manhours into designing the best touch-based UI man has ever seen, but you forget to add an exposure slider and a simple pull down for daylight/incandescent/fluorescent white balance? WTF?

Lastly, the headphone jack placement. I can understand that there’s not much room for it, but the bottom would be a much better place for the cord to be jutting out. Seriously. I hate the jack being at the top.

All of that said though, I don’t think I’d trade this thing for the world right now. It does so many damn things that I never knew I was missing. The ability to have what basically amounts to a location-aware, always-connected computer in the palm of your hand is incredible. Not to mention I’ve taken up posting to my flickr photostream and youtube much more since I have a camera in my pocket at all times. I’ve even opened a twitter account because of this damn thing.

So, what apps am I using? Lots of free ones. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a card-carrying charter member of the Cheap Bastards Association. Some of the apps I’m using the most are…

• Echofon – free twitter app that includes automated insertion of Google maps links, photos, and videos. Also automatically shortens URLs. Pretty damn sweet for something that’s free.
• Bump – Contact/image/video transfer between iPhone OS devices. Think old-school palmOS “beam” functionality, but without the hassle of IR transmissions and with the addition of fist bumping. This should be standard software on every iPhone OS device. Apple needs to buy this company, and make this part of the iPhone OS. Seriously.
• AT&T myWireless – AT&T account monitoring and management. Pretty much a no-duh thing to have for an iPhone.
• fring – the all-in-one IM/Skype/video conferenceing app. My only gripe is that you can’t get rid of the damn “Fring Test Call” buddy listing.
• Pandora Radio – This is the most awesome thing ever. Screw both terrestrial and satellite radio.
• I Can Has Cheezburger – You’ve gotta have LOLcats. This is not optional.
• Flickr – The Flickr app is another no-brainer. Honestly, this should be part of the camera app, the same way that Youtube is in the camera app for video.
• PS Mobile – Photoshop… ON YOUR PHONE.
• Naturespace – …zzzZZZzzz… …zzzZZZzzz… *drool* *snort* Oh hey, was I supposed to write something here?
• Pic2Shop – Barcode scanner, with amazon and froogle integration. Pretty damn cool.
• 3D Camera Lite – Makes AWESOME stereographic images, either anaglyphs or cross/parallel image pairs.
• Ping Lite – Awesome little network scanning tool.
• Words With Friends Free – Scrabble, over the Internet. A¹W⁴E¹S¹O¹M⁴E¹.
• Fandango – Finds theaters near you, and displays showtimes. Pretty cool.

I also have a home screen link to Wunderground’s iPhone optimized site on my main screen, the url is http://i.wund.com and the fullscreen wundermap on that page is great.

In conclusion, I still hate AT&T’s customer service, but I’m willing to suffer their idiodicy for this phone.

I haven’t posted in over a month, that’s like 12 blogyears! I’ve just been busy as hell lately. I’ll try to spin up a few posts on things we’ve been doing around here lately. I hope I can remember back that far…

I’ve been slacking on the updates lately, let’s see if I can catch up a bit.

Westly’s sister Lucy was here for three weeks, with our neice Natalia. She’s been out in Nevada for a bit, one comment she made about coming back here was that the air is so much “softer” compared to the air in the desert; there’s no wind-blown sand and the humidity is higher so it doesn’t dry your skin out. Albemarle Hospital almost killed her while she was here too. They misdiagnosed a blood clot in her arm as a strain and told her to go on home. She and Wes went for a second opinion up at Chesapeake General, where an utrasound showed the clot. I’m not sure WTF it is about staying at out place that seems to cause peole to have to go to the hospital all the damn time for random wierd shit, but if you ever come to spend a night, make sure you bring your insurance card.

I’m going to be working up some info for the floor techs on the Microsoft Windows 7 launch soon. Honestly, there’s not that much of a difference from Vista, aside from a couple of cosmetic interface changes. I still don’t like the fact that they hide the names of apps in the task bar until you mouse over them. We have a hard time getting customers to locate things that are running down there with labels, getting them to find things AND use the mouse at the same time will be impossible. I know, you’re thinking that I’m blowing that out of proportion, but we normally talk to people who can’t figure out how to open the battery door on a camera, or ask what it means when the printer says it’s out of paper. Customers who can read and use the mouse at the same time are a rare and highly valued treat for our techs.

The 5% pay hit that Canon USA rolled out last month has caught up with us. We were just barely scratching by before, so now we’re seriously farked. Wes is hunting for either a second part-time job, or a replacement full time job. This really sucks, because she really liked the fact that working from home gave her more time with the kids.

I learned a valuable lesson about automotive repair a little while back. If your air conditioner condensation line gets blocked up, get your air compressor to clear it out. Do not put your mouth on the line and blow. Also, fermented coil water tastes REAL BAD.

I’ve recently started using Google Latitude. I’ve submitted my wireless access point’s location and MAC address to skyhook’s website, but they don’t seem to have added it to the database quite yet. I’ll throw a little side bar badge for Latitude on the side bar once it starts locating me properly on a regular basis.

I also signed up for Google Voice and got a 757 area code phone number so both my parents and Wes’s parents can call us without paying long distance. If you need this number, email me.

Speaking of phone numbers, my cell number is long gone. I haven’t re-boosted it in MONTHS, and they killed my account completely. If you have the number ending in 1117 in your address book, go ahead and delete it.

That’s all I can think of at the moment, if I think of anything else, I’ll post it here.

HURRRRRRR...

I’ve generally just accepted video games at face value, and haven’t worried about things like how the physics really work out, or how the characters take care of basic biological needs. Apparently, these guys from Kotuaku have too much free time to consider things like this. Allow me to give you a brief excerpt of a conversation posted on Kotaku’s video game blog…

10:01:53 AM Owen: hey, pac-man question: how big were the dots and the energizers, in pixels
10:02:08 AM Fletch: You mean on the original video game screen?
10:02:16 AM Owen: yeah, 2×2 for dots, and roughly 8×8 for the energizers?
10:02:20 AM Fletch: i guess. I don’t have bionic graphic measurement powers
10:02:37 AM Owen: I’m trying to figure how big a shit Pac-Man would take after one board.

Suffice to say, the conversation goes downhill rapidly from there, though you do have to admire their thoroughness in their efforts to produce an accurate estimate. I’m with Owen, the ghosts should totally count. You can see the whole conversation here, along with graphics to illustrate the final outcome of the calculations.

Now come to think of it, how DOES the Master Cheif from HALO handle his biological needs? Is he wearing a NASA-grade diaper under that space-suit? The world may never know (and may never want to either).

I would like to take a brief moment to thank the kind folks of the Wordpress community and Automattic for releasing the new Wordpress app for the iPhone and iPod touch. It fixes everthing that made this app painful to use. Sorry about the two star rating and the harsh comment in the app store the other day. No hard feelings, right?

You know what really grinds my gears? Stupid mobile IM software that leaves you “logged in” for some obscene amount of time after you’ve closed the program and put your device to sleep.

Here’s a tip, app developers; if people want to send me a message regardless of my online status, there’s already a facility for doing that called “e-mail.” It’s been around for a while now. You should look into it.

If someone sends me an “instant message”, it’s under the assumption that I’m online and will be able to answer them right then. They don’t want to have to guess wether or not I’m actually online like the app says, or if my account has been hijacked by some stupid zombie IM app.

Long rant made short: when I close an IM app, log me the hell out, don’t keep me online in zombie status for 30 minutes. Ass.

While the Internet itself was an offshoot of a DARPA project here in the good ol’ US of A, the protocol that most people associate with the word “Internet” is actually from a country better known for it’s secretive banks and superior timepieces.

Somewhere in the halls of CERN, a fellow by the name of Tim Berners-Lee thought it would be clever to create a method of formatting, serving and displaying information that contained references to other documents, allowing the viewer to quickly cross-reference information and edit it. He called it “hypertext.” His fairly vaporous proposal for the idea was simply called “Information Management; a Proposal” and luckily for us all, his forward-looking boss gave him the go-ahead to delve deeper into the idea.

Thanks to the birth of hypertext, the world has seen a huge change in the way information is distributed. Printed media is all but obsolete, saved only by the fact that some of us like to sit down with a dead-tree-format newspaper or book once in a while. Entire empires have been built on providing services through the Web, and more information is available to more people than ever before.

Of course, if Mr. Berners-Lee had known about all the other things the World Wide Web would spawn, he may not have been so quick to present his proposal; Geocities, MySpace, the “goatse” guy, rick-rolling, and a thousand other things I’d rather not mention could only exist through the Web.

Thankfully, good ol’ Tim didn’t have a crystal ball, so you’ve had the pleasure of reading this rant that I posted in my jammies in bed from an iPod. HOORAY FOR THE WEB!

Speaking of the web and hypertext, here’s a link to the CERN 20th anniversary of the Web site. Ironically, I had to fall back and add that link in hand crafted HTML on the mobile Safari browser on this iPod. I guess we haven’t advanced too terribly far after all, huh?

Google Maps Image Cutter is a sweet little Java based app made by the University College London’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis for displaying very high resolution pictures interactively on a web page without the need to transfer the entire image at once or have it taking up enormous amounts of memory in the browser’s cache.

In a round-about way, it also allows photographers to display a high resolution image on their page without needing to worry about people stealing it quite as much. Granted, if someone was industrious enough they could quite possibly stitch the original together from the hundreds or thousands of 256×256 tiles, but 99.999% of users out there aren’t going to bother with all that.

Here’s a sample, from a picture I took at the Carolina Cup Regata last year. If you look hard enough, you’ll see Mr. Justin Falls, who is the photographer for the local newspaper, and my next door neighbor. He dumped all his N*kon gear early last year and went whole hog for Canon cameras.

Trogdor the Burninator is six years old today! Happy birthday, Troggie!

Remember how I said comment spamming was way down? Looks like someone’s working on that. I’ve seen an increase in spam comments that appear to be coming from random PC’s around the US, but none of them actually contain any links. They’re all the same, with a commenter address in the form of [some common first name]@gmail.com with a comment consisting of a dozen or so random upper and lower case letters. It looks like someone’s test firing their bots with garbage to see if they work before they get down to business. Hooray for Akismet! It’s already stopped over 52 THOUSAND spam comments to my blog from last July to the middle of last October when the spampocolypse hit, and it looks like it’s vacation is going to be over soon.

Back in October and November of ‘08, the Srizbi and Rustock Spammer botnets were seriously wounded by a series of actions by administrators around the world. Most notably, the folks at Hurricane Electric. Hurricane provided Internet backbone connectivity to a shady server farm business called “McColo” who’s client base used their collocated servers as the command center for hundreds of thousands of PC’s infected with malicious software.  These zombie PC’s would “call home” at regular intervals, download templates and address lists, and then spew Spam onto the Internet in massive quantities. Hurricane was presented with some rather compelling evidence about it’s downstream client’s bad behavior, and subsequently pulled the plug on their part of their internet connectivity, in a coordinated move with the other telecommunications companies that were selling connections to Mc Colo. The decapitation of these botnets resulted in a roughly 40% drop in the amount of email spam worldwide. So, did anyone actually notice that drop? Did it change the rate of any other types of Spam?

Yeah. That's a significant drop.

How about “HELL YEAH.” At one point, my blog had to filter out 237 spam comments in one day, though the average was closer to 100. Lately, nine spams a day is a “bad day.” I can’t even begin to imagine the processing overhead that was freed up on the world’s mail and website servers the day those bots died.

So, what can John Q. Public do to prevent another outbreak of zombified, spam-spewing PC’s clogging up the Internet? It’s quite simple really, let me break this down into a four-point-plan for you after the link: (more…)

Changed up the look of the page again, and juiced up the back end stuff. Let me know if anything is horribly broken.

I’m trying out a new look for the site. I’ve checked what I can, but if you see something that’s Just Not Right, let me know, thanks.

Evidence of the world's first TDD rickroll, recovered from the trash next to the TDD at work. Click to enlarge.

I think this may have been a world’s first. Does anyone have evidence of a prior teletype rickroll? Also, there’s another special message on that same sheet from the night before the rickroll. Props to Jason for giving me the TDD to play with, John for recovering the paper, and Phil for getting pics of the reaction as it happened (I’ll post those tomorrow). Video after the jump… (more…)

I just hacked up my own geotagging software based on my mologogo data from my web site. Not too shabby.

This is how it works.
I have a cheap-@$$ Boost Mobile Phone with the mologogo client software on it.
That client software “phones home” to my blog and saves waypoints to a database there about once a minute.
I take pictures with my camera.
I come home and download my pictures.
I copy the “selects”, the pictures I really like and want to upload somewhere, and copy them to a “postpics” directory on my desktop. This is more for my convenience than anything else.
I run a script I wrote called geotag.sh. It does the following things for me, with no intervention required:

• Grabs a list of all the pictures in the directory. For each picture in the directory, it does the following:
• Use exiftool to extract the shooting date and time.
• Query the database on my blog for the lat and long of the waypoint at that time, or the last known position before that time.
• Take that info, and jam it back into the image’s EXIF data using exiftool again.
• Repeat for each image in the list of images in that directory.

Once it’s done chewing on that, I upload my pictures to Flickr, and boom – pre-mapped for my convenience.

Note that you MUST turn on EXIF GPS data in your account security settings for this to work.

Also note that this is absolutely NOT for the faint of heart, and that I’m doing this with Mac OS and it’s lovely UNIX underbelly, with some seriously not-so-great and completely custom PHP/MySQL programming on the server end. This project was hacked up in a matter of a couple hours or so, starting from me needing to refresh myself on PHP and SQL because I hadn’t programmed them in a bit. No, I’m not ready to release any of this code, and I’m not sure I ever will be. Sorry.

There’s been some noise online lately about random Internet miscreants banding together on IRC and various image boards to do some creative trolling of epilepsy boards. This is wrong, horrible and an atrocious crime. I, of course, laughed my ass off when I read about it. The fact is though, 7-11 had them all beat with this ad from 1970 that could probably produce seizures even in perfectly healthy folks. Honestly, I even got a little queesy watching this.

A while back I posted my FAIL collection for the enjoyment of Internet nerds around the world. Unfortunately, seeing as I’m a cheap bastage, Flickr has long since forgotten about the images and they’ve been 404-ified. Thanks to the new Image Gallery function of Wordpress though, I’m going to upload my entire collection here for the world’s continued enjoyment. Most of these have been collected from Fark, various chans (don’t ask), blogs and a ton of other places. Anyone and everyone may feel free to link to more delicious fail as you find it, and I’ll add it to the collection. I haven’t disabled hot linking, but don’t abuse it, OK?

I’m dedicating this post to Je’aime and Eric, for getting stomped the first few rounds on Saturday by a 10 year old. This one’s for you, guys.

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Apparently there’s a bit of controversy over this image of Dick “Emperor Palpatine” Cheney, that at first appears to show a naked woman in the reflection in his glasses. Thankfully this site has the full story about what you’re seeing there with a zoom tool and everything. Click here to see what Dick is actually smiling about.

This is insanely stupid. I also find it rather amusing.

Did you know that the song “Mahna Mahna” (also known as “phenomenon” because of a later muppets cover) originally debuted as the sound track for a steamy sauna scene in the soft core Italian porn film “Svezia, inferno e paradiso” in 1968? Did you know that the band Cake later did a pretty rockin’ cover of it in 2002 for a charity CD? Neither did I, and I’m not sure I wanted to know parts of that. Check out the Cake version after the jump. (more…)