iPhone 3G [S] in…
Posted on 22 June 2009 | Comments Off
… BlackBerry 8703e out.
Yup. At 8:43PM on the 19th, we walked into the Lynnwood, WA Apple Store at the Alderwood Mall and made the switch to ATT from Sprint.
This being the first iPhone i’ve owned, I am extremely impressed. The 3GS seems to have everything that it needs, and I am not sure I would have been happy with anything less.
Also grabbed a Speck PixelSkin in black (pictured on right) along with the Crystal Film Set protective screen cover.
Personally, I think it’s silly to buy a device and baby it… If it’s that fragile. it’s worthless.
With that being said, the iPhone is a little delicate (at least more than a BlackBerry), so it needed the accessories.
Now it’s armored and ready for my regular level of device abuse.
~moses
Twitpocalypse! Run for your lives…
Posted on 13 June 2009 | Comments Off
Just before midnight last night @ 23:52 GMT (06-12-09), the total number of tweets on Twitter exceeded the value of a 32-bit signed integer.
Of course, as expected Twitter was not affected — after all, this is their game and they were well prepared. However, considering that the majority of Twitter users are using 3rd party tools to interact with Twitter, it is no surprise that problems have and will arise.
I awoke this morning and found zero new tweets to read as well as noticed the search functionality of my main desktop twitter client (Tweetie) was dead. This must be a complete coincidence and nothing more right?
Now I was speculating, that it just must be a beautiful Saturday morning throughout our little planet and the twittersphere was out enjoying the day away from the more than 2,147,483,647 (maximum value for a 32-bit signed integer) total tweets which are now part of history.
Tweetie search… confirmed dead.
Loren Brichter from atebits (@atebits / http://www.atebits.com), the creator of Tweetie confirmed this morning that Tweetie is in-fact suffering from twitpocalypse related injuries.
atebits: “Busted searches in Tweetie are Twitpocalypse-related. Hoping to find some Internet tonight so I can get an update out. Mea culpa.”
Tweetie’s broken search is a minor casualty, but I do speculate that this mornings eerie tweet silence is due to a few more Twitter clients dropping like flies in the face of integer overflows.
Visit http://www.twitpocalypse.com/ for the current total of Twitter tweets. As of this post the total was running through 2,153,991,662 tweets and growing at an average of 131 tweets per second. — surely it should be higher than 131 tweets per second…
This new age Twitter crowd is calling this the Y2K of their time and the buzz surrounding the newly coined term ‘twitpocalypse’ is getting rather fervent. Well, if by Y2K of their kind, they mean an over-hyped and exaggerated nothing… then yes, I will agree and folks this is like Y2K all over again!
UPDATE: Twitterific for the iPhone and iPod Touch are confirmed to be failing due to the signed integer trouble as well. The desktop version of the application is unaffected (so it seems).
UPDATE: Nambu is reporting they have replies showing up next to every tweet. They admit they did not make a wise integer selection and will have it resolved as quickly as possible.
UPDATE: Tweetie for the desktop has been updated (1.2.2) and Tweetie for the iPhone has been updated and sent for App Store approval; Thanks @atebits!
For me, I think I will go enjoy this rare but beautiful Saturday with my family.
Oh, and I think I should probably drop a link and an invitation to follow me on Twitter: @loyalmoses
~moses
Facebook’s digital real estate frenzy
Posted on 12 June 2009 | Comments Off
If you are a Facebook’r (which I am not), then you have no doubt heard of, or have already staked a claim on a vanity URL.
However, for those who may have just joined Facebook for a vanity URL after hearing of the announcement, you are completely out of luck! … well, for the next two weeks anyway.
Eligibility is limited to anyone who joined Facebook before usernames were publicly announced at 3 p.m. (EDT) on June 9, 2009. These users will have the chance to claim usernames at 12:01 a.m. (EDT) on Saturday, June 13, 2009.
This limitation is temporary. All users who joined Facebook after the cut-off will be eligible to claim usernames on Sunday, June 28, 2009.
Direct link to the Facebook help topic
Apparently, the reasoning is to prevent people from creating new accounts just to take advantage of reserving a username.
Hmmm… I would have guessed that a marketing and media campaign to release a hugely popular new feature was designed specifically to gather more users and gain additional market share. But, as I said above I don’t use Facebook and this might have contributed to me being completely wrong here.
Of course, I’m not completely dense. I understand their intentions in wanting to provide current users with a generous amount of time in which to take advantage of the vanity URL’s before all of those dirty rotten username squatters show up.
Regardless, it sounds a bit silly to me.
~moses
No BlackBerry, the iPhone 3G S and I are only friends!
Posted on 12 June 2009 | Comments Off
Well BlackBerry 8703e, you’ve been good to me. It’s been a few years now, your display is scratched, your battery isn’t quite what it used to be, we’ve reloaded a few times but for the most part, you’ve been a great device and I’ve enjoyed the companionship.
An Apple fan, without an iPhone. What the?!
When the original iPhone was released back in 2007, as an Apple fan (not the slobbering Steve Jobs obsessed type) I was obviously excited about the device, but couldn’t give up the BlackBerry because many of the applications I used daily were not available on the iPhone. Password management, SSH client and TeleNav are only a few of the reasons that kept me from switching.
The Apple App Store changed things.
In 2008, the iPhone 3G became much more attractive and went immediately on my short list when the App Store was released. However, because the newness of the original iPhone had warn off, I wasn’t in any hurry to drop my family phone provider and jump to AT&T — The BlackBerry is a work horse and was serving me well.
Time flies.
2009 snuck up on me and of course all of the buzz surrounding a “new” iPhone couldn’t be ignored and it ultimately was enough pressure to to allow thoughts of provider switching, to enter my mind.
Reservations.
No, not the “doubt” definition of reservations. With the announcement of the iPhone 3G S at WWDC ’09 I finally caved and may now be numbered soon among the owners of the “fastest, most powerful iPhone yet.”. The new phone is reserved at the nearest Apple store and I have exactly one week for my BlackBerry to convince me otherwise, or cave completely and resign itself to the darkness of the old phone drawer.
… and yes, that picture above is the 8703e that I will so dearly miss if it can’t produce a strong argument.
~moses
Flex and AIR Consulting / Professional Services
Posted on 12 June 2009 | Comments Off
Half empty. Time for a refill!
Within the last 10 days or so, I’ve been able to wrap up several small Adobe Flex and AIR projects and now have some availability for some interesting and / or unique opportunities. Let’s hear em’.
Regarding the Flex / AIR sector in general; I am still absolutely amazed at the shear number of Flex and AIR projects that are in search of developers for both consulting and long-term contract work. Although I pass on dedicated contract work, any new or experienced Flex developer has a near unending supply of opportunity to harvest from it seems.
Unique, technical or interesting projects of any type are of course a preference, however I also enjoy cranking out small or quick one-off solutions.
As I said above, let’s hear what you got!
~moses
Flex 4 state syntax example usage
Posted on 5 June 2009 | Comments Off
Raise your hand if you were as frustrated as I when it came to Flex 3 and state management.
Simple or basic application states were of no real concern, but as states grew and became more and more complicated, managing and manipulating these states became a tedious and even just plain silly task.
Flex 4 (“Gumbo”) brings about a much more advanced and welcome implementation of states.
This isn’t a blog post comparing Flex 3 and Flex 4′s state architectures, but more a simple example of using the new state syntax in Flex 4. Regardless if you had ever used states in Flex 3 or not is really unimportant, this is the new and ‘correct’ way to implement an application state system. IMHO.
Flex 4 states are defined as follows:
[as3]
<s:states>
<s:State name="State1"/>
<s:State name="State2"/>
</s:states>
[/as3]
Using Flex 4 states on a specific button component would be as follows:
[as3]
<s:Button
label="I’m a button"
x.State1="10" y.State1="10"
x.State2="20" y.State2="20"
click.State1="button_clickHandler(event)"
click.State2="other_clickHandler(event)"
/>
[/as3]
Another obviously excellent set of features in the new Flex 4 state system are the “includeIn” and “excludeFrom” attributes:
[as3]
<mx:Label x="100" y="200" text="My Label 1" includeIn="State1, State2"/>
<mx:Label x="100" y="300" text="My Label 2" excludeFrom="State2"/>
[/as3]
Well done guys!
All the meat on states in Flex 4, with comparisons to Flex 3 and Flex 2 can be found here. This is a good read!
http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Enhanced+States+Syntax
~moses
Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst Beta’s
Posted on 31 May 2009 | Comments Off
This evening, Adobe made available public beta’s of Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst.
Pretty exciting news no doubt, and as you can see I have already allocated my portion of Adobe Labs bandwidth for the next half-hour.
Now I need to find some time in my already overloaded schedule to do some playing work with the new beta apps.
As quickly as I can wrap up a few current Flex & AIR client projects, you can bet I will be spending some quality time getting to know the new tools more intimately.
As you can see from the downloads window above, Adobe Labs has both the Eclipse plugin and stand-alone versions of Flash Builder 4 Beta available.
Go get em’ : Adobe Labs / Downloads : http://labs.adobe.com/downloads
~moses
180′s & Mac’s
Posted on 27 May 2009 | Comments Off
It’s hard not to appreciate the two of these together.
SPAM! the war and my inbox
Posted on 26 May 2009 | Comments Off
SPAM! We all hate it.
I was once told quite some time ago by a close colleague who happens to be a very knowledgeable and successful Internet marketing guru, that the truth behind SPAM, is that it works and works quite well.
If SPAM didn’t work, they would stop. It’s that simple.
But unfortunately for every unsolicited email that gets whacked by our SPAM filters or obliterated with a stroke of the delete key, someone, somewhere is reading, believing, clicking and ultimately confirming to SPAMMERS that the old adage about a sucker being born every minute is true.
I can assure all of you that I am not the sucker. However, if it happens to be you… knock it off. You are are really frustrating us non-suckers!
I have a few dozen email addresses that are in continuous use and of course SPAM is a constant issue with many of them. My combat strategy has always been a two-prong defense and includes both server and client side vectors.
On the server, I use SpamAssassin fully configured with appropriate thresholds and scoring for my tastes and a whole handful of black list services implemented.
On the client side, I use Mail (default Mail application in OS X) with SpamSieve which is primary a bayesian algorithm based implementation. http://c-command.com/spamsieve/
The combination of these two work rather well for me and on any given day, SpamAssassin is working overtime with an average of 3,000 to 4,000 emails cleaned and whatever slips by is picked up by SpamSieve, which averages just over 400 SPAM messages a day.
Unfortunately I didn’t capture a screenshot of my SpamSieve statistics before the recent reload of this machine earlier this month, it would have been very interesting to see SPAM statistics over an 18 month time period.
This is my current statistics from SpamSieve for the period from 05/12/09 to 05/26/09
It has always been at 99% or better and makes an excellent backup to catch what sneaks through the server.
~moses
Replace the ugly Eclipse icon with the Flex Builder icon
Posted on 18 May 2009 | 2 responses
I can’t imagine I am alone on this one, but I absolutely cannot stand the Eclipse icon.
Whenever possible, that horrific purple monstrosity sitting in my OS X dock gets kicked to the curb and replaced by the much more handsome Flex Builder icon. Soon it will be replaced with the Flash Builder icon. 
For those who share my feelings, this is the quick dirt on making the swap and is rather simple for anyone familiar with OS X.
If you don’t have both Flex Builder and Eclipse installed, you can download the “flexbuilder.icns” icon file here.
To begin, right click the Flex Builder application and select “Show Package Contents”
Browse to the Contents->Resources folder and copy the “flexbuilder.icns” icon into the clipboard.
Next, right click the Eclipse application and select “Show Package Contents”
Browse once again to the Contents->Resources folder and rename “Eclipse.icns” to “Eclipse_old.icns” or something else handy just in case you change your fancy.
Paste your clipboard copy of “flexbuilder.icns” into the Resources folder and rename to “Eclipse.icns”.
Restart Eclipse.
Done. Enjoy.
~moses
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