I received an alumnimum Mac Book Pro a little while ago and I began to scour the net to find some great websites for getting the most out of my system. I figured I’d create a list to give back some link love.
Two days in a row I’ve woken up to a dead iPhone. This isn’t so bad but I generally like to have a working phone while I’m on the road. The first day this happened, I wasn’t sure of the cause. Today, I’ve figured it out. It’s the Pandora client.
I don’t think that the client necessarily is doing anything wrong, I just think it’s not doing some thing right. I was listening to Pandora in my car, when I arrived home, I disconnected the iPhone from my aux jack and didn’t use my phone again until the next day. Pandora, I’m guessing, happily kept open the network connection which ultimately drained my battery.
It should behave more like the iPod client application. When the signal is lost on the headphone jack it should stop playing or in Pandora’s case stop streaming.
Anyone else having strange problems with the battery draining? Post them here.
I like many people eagerly updated the iPhone OS to version 3.0 the day it was released. I did it mainly for the copy and paste functionality. I noticed however, that once I did this my phone no longer performed as well as it did before.
This performance hit has taken a couple of forms. All quite annoying. App loading time has increased, including the built-in Apple applications. Clicking the messages application to send an SMS takes 7 seconds to load. In the previous version, this was instantaneous.
I’ve also noticed that I am dialing wrong numbers a lot more frequently. I’ve finally figured out why. It seems that my brain was programmed to press the iPhone buttons at a certain rate. With the update in the OS, screen changes happen slower than what I am used to so I’m hitting the wrong contact.
All in all, this is a rather annoying circumstance which after searching the Google machine, I’m not alone in experiencing.
I’m going to try one last thing. Wiping my iPhone and starting with a fresh OS 3.0. If that doesn’t work, I’m going to have to try reverting back to the previous version. A rather disheartening proposition but I’m willing to sacrifice some of the new features for stability and speed.
I have found what has to be the coolest Firefox plugins ever. I often spend hours scouring the web for bits of information that I need to bring into other documents. Many times, I’ll want to bring in a web table to Excel. This is often met with frustration and a lot of manual tweaking. Well, no more. Thanks to OutWit Technologies. They have developed a cool plug-in that extracts various bits of data from websites including images, text, and tables.
In the two figures above you can see an example of the extraction engine at work. I’ve loaded a page from Wikipedia that includes a table. I run the extraction on the page and the table is automatically pulled out. I can then copy and paste this easily into Excel. What’s really cool about this software is if you’re a regular expression geek, you can tune the extraction so it pulls the right data.
If you ever needed to pull data out of web pages, get this Firefox add-in today.
Two completely disparate topics but my brain generally jumps from topic to topic almost randomly.
First, I listened to a great podcast this morning discussing how social media companies need to start thinking about ways to leverage the portable social graph.
Second, are short URL services harmful to search rankings? Google uses the context of the text of an anchor tag to help identify the landing link. URL shortners generally aren’t inserted into anchor tags. Also, since URLs are redirected, does it effect backlinking?
John Winsor, Business Week contributor as solicited opinions from the twitterazzi about the phenomenom of crowd sourcing.
Some have predicted that the crowdsourcing phenomenon will accelerate creativity across a larger network. Others, meanwhile, have predicted the practice of opening up a task to the public instead of keeping it in-house or using a contractor will prove to be the demise of many industries. To accompany my piece on the future of the discipline, we decided to open things up. By canvassing opinions through Twitter and through my personal blog, I’m able to give you the crowd’s take on crowdsourcing.
Commentors include Shaun Abrahamson (@shaunabe), Brett T. T. Macfarlane (@macfarbt), Doron Reuveni (@doronr), Hutch Carpenter (@bhc3), Zeny Huang (@zenydala).
The trick with crowd sourcing is finding out the types of tasks that are appropriate for the crowd. Once you do that, the next challenge is figuring out a way to leverage the crowd in a cost effective way. Using the Amazon Mechanical Turk to filter images for porn is a great way to effectively use the crowd to solve a problem that could not be solved as cost effectively in-house.
So recently, I started recieving bonce back message in my inbox indicating of people complaining about spam messages getting sent to them. It would appear that someone has begun forging my domain name (cotellese.net) in order to send out spam.
How can this happen?
Well, it’s actually quite easy for spammers to replace the From and Reply to fields with an email address of their choice. If someone hits a reply it will come to whatever address is in either of those fields.
Where did the mail really come from?
Actually, I don’t know but I’m trying to figure it out. My guess is it’s one or more spam bots so tracking down the perps might be a challenge.
If you’ve received one of these emails, I apologize and I’m asking for your help. Please forward me the original email including the email headers. Inside the headers I can find the ip address of the computer sending the email.
What a pain.
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