Archived entries for geek
Syndication package tracking
Something I’ve been waiting for a long time: package tracking as RSS feeds. Adagio Teas, who I order from frequently, are making FedEx tracking available via RSS:
My iPhone 1.1.1 Update
My iPhone is not unlocked, but I had installed Installer.app and a couple applications, though the only ones I was using with any regularity were iFlickr and Erica Sadun’s SendPics. I installed it last night, after making sure to sync up first. Partway into the “Preparing iPhone” progress bar, the phone went dark and then popped up the yellow triangle/”Please connect to iTunes” screen, which I took as a sign that things were not going well. A few minutes later I got a -1005 (iirc) error message from iTunes. Even with a backup, I still always get that frisson of fear when something like that happens.
Fortunately, at that point I just restored. I lost some photos that I hadn’t imported – somehow I had gotten the dumb idea that photos were imported without pressing the damn import button- but otherwise I’m back to normal, if less my iToner ringtones and Installer.app.
The iTunes WiFi music store is pretty cool. You could easily drop a lot of impulse money on it. Not that I have, of course; I just bought a couple things in the interests of investigating the interface. The store gives Apple a little bit of an edge in this market again; right now, you can’t buy from Amazon MP3 on your iPhone or iPod Touch. If I were Amazon, I’d be figuring out a way to do that.
Technorati Tags: apple, installer.app, iphone
Slip of the hand
Seen this morning whilst goofing round in Google Book Search:
Technorati Tags: digital libraries, digitization, google books, libraries
Fix your WordPress install
Via Shelley Powers, there’s a must-install WordPress Update:
WordPress users, upgrade to today’s WordPress security release immediately. This fixes a vulnerability that is ‘in the wild’–examples of how to exploit can be easily found and just as easily exploited.This is not a “We’ll sit around and think about it” update. This is a “Take the steak off the bar-b-que, Joe, and put the margaritas back in the jug! We’ve got work to do!” service release.
Done here – do the same if you’re running WP.
Thanks, iPhone beta testers!
New iPhone features (kottke.org):
John Gruber remarked on the lack of a clipboard on the iPhone and I found myself missing that feature this afternoon. Steven Johnson suggested a double-click of the Home button as a shortcut to the phone favorites screen to shorten initiation times for frequent calls. Both of these observations beg the question: how are new capabilities going to get added to the iPhone? A bunch of you are either interaction/interface designers or otherwise clever folks…how would you add a feature like a clipboard to the iPhone?
I really appreciate you all working out the bugs on this thing so that when my Verizon contract runs out next year I’ll be able to get the cheaper, better, faster results at the low cost of some early adopter whuffie. Thanks.
Now software questions
Scanners the last time, this time it’s presentation software. Or is that digital library software? Collection management software? Our original pilot project went up on a very old version of Greenstone, and again I am having trouble turning up anything more than Greenstone and CONTENTdm (Perhaps the google-fu is weak in this one.) Our Herbarium uses KE Software’s kEMu for its collections, and while it seems strong in some areas, I have some reservations about its use for digital library collections, mainly that I can’t find a whole lot of libraries using it. (Also, it doesn’t appear to have any MARC support.) Again, is there something I am missing? Are people just using LAMP stacks for this?Are most installations just homegrown? Lots to learn…
Waiting on the upgrade
Well, I dunno if this revokes my geek credentials, but at the moment I don’t feel like putting in the time and effort to upgrade this WordPress installation. I did the prep up to downloading the release, but then having to pick through individual files instead of just doing a nice tar overlay isn’t doing it for me right now. If not installing will mean that the terrorists have won or can use my blog for mind control, let me know. Otherwise I’m just writing for a while.
Keep it simple
Pete Lacey’s Weblog :: The S stands for Simple
Dev: (Reads WSDL spec). I trust that the guys who wrote this have been shot. It’s not even internally consistent. And what’s with all this HTTP GET bindings. I thought GET was undefined.
I found this quite funny. I may be wrong, but I think I’m seeing a desire to move from the hideously complex protocols and tools of Enterrpise Development to simpler, more, dare I say it, agile (as in not encumbered with enough stuff to choke a mainframe) methods.
List processing
I can no longer remember where I got this but it’s quite good, and surprising, coming from a Perl geek like MJD.
[IWE] Why Lisp macros are cool, a Perl perspective
But a bigger advantage is that it makes it possible to write Lisp programs that reliably generate and transform Lisp source code. If you’re not used to Lisp, it’s hard to imagine how tremendously useful this is. People who come from the Perl and C world have a deep suspicion of source code transformation, because it’s invariably unreliable.
It really is all just lists, which is the simplicity that gives Lisp such power and also makes people suspect that they’re missing something. As “Paul” is quoted in the article saying:
Paul told me that he liked Lisp *because* there was hardly any syntax to remember, and it was all simple. “Everything’s an expression,” he said. “Every expresion (sic) gets evaluated. If you don’t want it evaluated, you put a quote on it. Simple.”
Technorati Tags: geek, programming, lisp