Jonathan’s Universe

Archive for September, 2008

Lakeview Terrace staring Samuel L Jackson and Kerry Washington was a fairly well done film.

Chris and Lisa are a young couple and they just bought their first house. It’s beautiful; wonderful house, bright neighborhood. Or so they think. Their next door neighbor, Abel Turner, is not too fond of interracial couples. He wreaks havoc to the couple by shining lights into their bedroom at 3 AM, allegedly slashing their car’s tires and making rude statements at their housewarming party.

Turner REALLY hates Chris and Lisa. Probably Chris more than Lisa. The worst part is Turner is a cop, so it’s not like they can call the police when he is doing stuff to them.

This was a movie that I liked. It had a little bit of humor but contained the action you’d expect from a SLJ film. Some of the dialog was a little drawn out and silly but still contained integrity. Many people believe this is a rip off of a Ray Liotta film, Unlawful Entry, but it is actually loosely-based on a true story. All in all, I liked this and was an enjoyable 1 hour 50 minutes.

So, I’ve stumbled upon a trick to restore the old Facebook.

I’d like to remind everyone who does this that Facebook can just as easily restore everyone’s back to the new Facebook and remove this workaround. I don’t know how long this method will be working. Minutes? Hours? Days? Trust me, Facebook will catch on to it.

Regardless. First you need to add the Facebook developer application. Personally, I’ve had this application since day 1, so I could skip this step. Once you’ve done that, click this link to “opt out” of the new Facebook. You might have to refresh to see the change after you fixed it. You will be restored to the old facebook design. You will see the “Click here to see the new Facebook” bar again and be able to click it to go back to it.

Again, I don’t know how long this will be available for. So get it while it’s hot!

EDIT: Facebook fixed it. Sorry guys. Back to the new version.

How many times have you said something like “Okay so-and-so, I am attaching this week’s productivity report.”… but then you forget to actually attach. The person replies with “wtf?” and you feel like a total moron. Google has just rolled out “Forgotten Attachment Detector.” It reminds you about attaching a file if it detects you intended to. I guess all this does is check for keywords in the message body.

The other feature is definitely quite handy. I get a lot of crap to my inbox. It isn’t really spam, but I don’t read it. Stuff like “Enclosed is your 10% off coupon to [some book category/genre I don't care about] at Borders!” Well, often I find myself just selecting mail and going to “More Actions” then “Mark as Read.” Well the newest Lab feature actually put’s a “Mark as Read” button right ontop of my inbox. This will save me some time and aggravation. Especially because sometimes I clicked “Star” or something like that. Oops.

Thanks Google!

Ah, yes. The Facebook redesign. it’s been out for quite some time now. Up until Friday I’ve had the option to still use the old Facebook, but my account has been since locked to the new Facebook. This is Facebooks attempt to push the new design so they no longer have to support and maintain the old design.

The feedback and response has been mixed but generally negative. Most people don’t like the new design. I’ll tell you why. Change. Yes, it’s something new. Humans are a creature of habit and routine. If this routine changes, their feeling of structure collapses. Also, another thing people don’t like is because it’s very buggy.

From a developer’s standpoint, I feel bad for the people on the product team. They have worked hard trying to excite and create a new Facebook for people to enjoy and in return they get ‘Anti-New Facebook Groups’ and really nasty feedback from spoiled brats. Take my word for it, a lot of work went into designing and programming this.

Now on the user standpoint. Aethestically, Facebook looks much better. Light colors, semi-transparency, rounded corners. It looks nice, but it’s like everything has changed location, so it will take some getting used to. But then again… remember the last Facebook changed? Yeah, everyone was doing the same thing with complaining. Now they are holding on so very dear to it.

The profile page. The most core component of Facebook. The wall, formerly a way of posting Comments between users, has been combined with the user’s news feed. This actually removes the clutter but also will cause confusion for people not used to the idea of combining the two components.  Profiles now have tabs which does remove the page-scrolling but increases the clicking. So it might be worse.

Remember some people who had like a thousand applications installed (I wish they wouldn’t)? Well, boxes generated by applications and such have been moved to the “boxes tab.” These tabs are kind of good. Let’s say you want to find someone’s screenname. Originally you’d have to scroll through all of their applications, wall posts, et cetera in order to get to it.  Now you just click “Info” and it’s quite easy to find

Facebook is a little buggy. The biggest one actually completely interferes with a task. On some profiles, I do not see a link to “View more pictures.” It simply isn’t there. It’s not that they don’t have any pictures, because they would If i were to be on the Facebook.. it’s just for some reason a link isn’t being rednered for them. I am sure Facebook will patch this and the other bugs and glitches soon.

A note to the New Facebook team. You’ve done a lot of work and a lot of people are ungrateful and unaccepting of the work you put out. It’ll just take some getting used to, that’s all. Keep up the good work.

For years Comcast has had an invisible data-transfer cap that seemed to vary from node-to-node. Basically if you transfer more than [some number you dont actually know] gigabytes of data (uploading/downloading) in a month, you get a phone call. If you do it again, they disable your account. I think at the time it was for a year.

Many people have had a problem with this. I mean, hey, you don’t know how much data you can transfer before it’s considered abusive. It’s kind of well.. just lame, Comcast. So it seems Comcast finally caved and have announced that effective October 1st, 2008, the data transfer cap is 250 GB monthly. This is a bit, it depends on what you use the internet for. Someone who just checks their mail has very little to worry about. Someone who watches multiple high definition movies and TV shows a day might have to curb their habits.

This kind of affects me. I have my brother who uses the internet for whatever, I use internet frequently for work, communications and programming where I constantly have many connections to open remote command line interfaces. And also my dad uses the internet. And also, there’s no way to accurately monitor your internet transfer quota easily.

I guess the fact that Comcast was forced to specify their caps is a victory in itself.

Also, Comcast has been enforcing network administration & management policies that involve throttling users that use BitTorrent and other P2P software. This means that these users who use those services will have slower upload/download speed and generally their requests will be deprioritized. Comcast claimed that it was doing this only during peak times to prevent other users from being affected by the heavy bandwidth consumption. But somebody posted some photographic evidence that their connection was throttled constantly all day.

Comcast was recently ordered by the FCC to cease this practice as it violates Net Neutrality regulations. Comcast is now attempting to sue the FCC and overturn the order… because it’s “unfair.”

I predict the downfall of Comcast and it will probably run out of business within the next decade.

This is a pretty amazing service. And it’s free!… To everyone!

Let’s say that I need to get a number of a pizza joint near here. I just call 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411), say my city and state. Then i can either say “Jano’s Pizza” or even just like “Pizza” and it’ll give me a list of relevant places. I can request more information about a returned item, like for example maybe “Goodfellla’s Pizza” came up, I just say “details.” I can also have the phone number, address and URL to the address on google maps texted to my phone. Except this doesn’t work for me. Probably because my phone number is ported from sprint to t-mobile. Apparently it’s a common problem with people who move carriers with their old number.

The voice recognition is pretty damn good. One time I said something pretty obscure (though i forgot what it was at this point) and it still got it. It’s actually creepy how good it knows what I am saying. I think out of the 10-20 times I’ve used it, it’s made one voice recognition error and that’s because it was really windy outside.

At no additional cost, Google 411 will automatically connect you to the returned business name, too.

This is an excellent service. And it’s free! Try it out. it’ll come in handy. Personally, i saved it to my phone as “411 Google” so it’s right there at the top of my list.

So, the a long time ago, I stumbled upon a website called Giveaway of the Day. Every day they give out a single program (that normally costs money) for free. It’s legal. It’s done via an agreement between the program developers and the GAOTD team. This in-concept is pretty cool. Infact they even have a Game Giveaway of the Day too.. but only on weekends.

Here’s the details:

Every day at 12:00 AM Pacific (3:00 AM Eastern) a new program is released. This program is only available for download on the given day. When you download the program, there is usually an activator involved. You click it before installing the program (or after depending on the software package) and it automatically sets you up to use this software (don’t have to register or buy anything). There’s some problems though.

Viruses?
Reading through comments of some files, it seems that some of them have some sort of malware embedded into them. The website has a guarantee that all software is checked for malware, but with every 5th or so program.. there’s reports of a virus? Hmm, makes me uneasy. But then again, you should always scan downloaded files for viruses. That goes without saying.

Variety
There’s not really any variety in the programs offered. Every now and then you get a cool killer app., but often enough, it’s something to do with videos. AVI Video converter, iPod video converter, FLV video encoder. Though to be fair, it seems lately there have been more variety than when I first found the site. But Jesus, why does the Gnome Screensaver keep being offered? And why would anyone normally pay $20.00 for that. Most of the games are puzzle-based games, which kind of sucks.

License
You’re pretty much given a demonstrative-user license. They always prohibit you from using the programs you acquire from them for non-commercial purposes. Uh.. okay, I’ll use my business card maker for non-commercial purposes. Because that makes sense.

Ridiculous Programs
Some programs offered are just ridiculous. Why sell somethng Windows already has? Though.. every now and then you get a potential gold mine, depending on what you do.

I’d check them out, but don’t expect neat software very often.

Am I the only one that finds the resemblance uncanny?

I have a question. You have a Facebook account. You submit your information to it. You know, your name, birthday, religion, likes, dislikes, addresses, phone numbers, etc. So do all your relatives and friends. Who owns everyone’s information? According to Facebook, not you.

Let’s say that you want to use another social network. MySpace.com, myYearBook.com, whatever. Should you have the ability to export your data from facebook and move it to whatever social network you want? So all/most of your profile information is transferred? According to Facebook, nope. The information, or at least the representation of the information is property of Facebook because you willingly submitted it to them.

Using an automated script to pull your data out and save it in a certain format to be imported to another service is a clear violation of the Terms of Service. It’s easily detectable. Unless you have a software package that adds a random delay between each page (to simulate “you reading it”), Facebook will detect that pages are being requested faster than a human could actually process the page information over a short period of time.

The same thing happened to Mr. Scoble. His account got disabled. I can see why Facebook does this from a proprietor standpoint, but why is everything always about the business and never about customer convenience?

Let’s say that you want to import all your friends’ email addresses and phone numbers to outlook or something of that nature. This is simply so you can easily contact your friends.  Let’s say that you use a laptop and you travel to a wireless network (work/school?) where facebook might be blocked. But you need Paul’s email address to email him something for class. Oh no. Facebook is blocked. Facebook, by way of policy prohibits you from assembling external lists like this. This will also get you banned, because you’d need a program to crawl all of your friends’ profiles and grab the information. Easily detectable. Unless your software package does the above… and even then, probably still slightly detectable.

I can also see why facebook prohibits this. This would be a drain on bandwidth, as well this would encourage companies to do spam marketing campaigns by harvesting emails found on profiles. I mean, you gotta look at both sides of the picture, but shouldn’t there be a happy medium, somehow?

So awhile back, I switched from Sprint to T-Mobile. It started out with me needing to get a new charger for my sprint phone because mine was lost and I couldn’t bring my mom’s charger with me when I went to South Carolina. I then walked out with a new plan on the T-Mobile network.. and a new phone. But I’ve had some grievances.

First, let me say the good thing. Their customer service for the most part is simply amazing. Their reps are always nice and do seem to care about you. One time I got an extra 300 minutes for the current pay period after talking to the representive. That was pretty cool. But again, they are really polite and ask you about your day. Friendliness is really important. Good job T-Mobile.

Now some caveats. The reception is horrid. I don’t get service in my house. Except on the arm of my couch I am sitting on now. And that’s sporadic. I also sporadically get service in my bed room on the first floor. As for the basement.. where the TV and comfortable couch is? Not a shot. Even places outside, I don’t get reception  on certain places of my porch and even the sidewalk outside my house. In my office, I barely get reception, I usually have to leave my office and go into the hallway to make or receive phone calls.

Second thing is their network infrastructure. I have a question, when you call someone and they don’t have service, what do you expect to hear? Their voicemail? A busy signal? With T-Mobile, if a subscriber unexpectedly leaves the network (ie, loss of signal, battery dies), any calls received don’t go to voicemail. At least not usually. More often than not, people get a busy signal. Only after an extended time of not having service does the network decide “oh, this person is unavailable, route callers to voicemail.”

You see, when you turn on your phone, your phone probably says “Registering with network” or something to that effect. This is your phone saying, “Hi, i’m a phone. I’m apart of your network. this is information about me.” The network keeps track of your “position” (which cell tower you’re on, etc) and the like. Now, if you shut of your phone (while you have service), your phone tells the network that it is leaving. Now people will be directed to voicemail immediately. If you lose service (or otherwise adbruptly leave the t-mobile network), the network still thinks you’re “there.” So when someone calls, it sends the caller to nothingness, hence the busy signal. It’s quite horrible. Especially when I’m in my house and my dad is trying to call me to find out what I want for dinner. Boo T-Mobile.

I have unlimited text messaging. I can text any US (maybe canadian?) numbers as many times I want (up to like 3,000 per month or some “acceptable fair use” amount). This is cool. I can’t dial short codes. These are the “send a text to #### for your vote” type services. This means I can’t a) request songs at my local radio station b) I can’t use twitter via my mobile device (the way it is intended to be used) c) i can’t use facebook via my mobile device. I try sending a text to one of the respective services, and I get a reply instantly back saying something to the effect, “This feature is not included in your service plan.” T-Mobile, come on, throw me a friggen bone here. So now I have to pay an extra $5.99 for “unlimited internet access” so I can use twitter and facebook via the web, instead of text messages. Kind of irritating. I’ll be starting that in my next pay period. Boo T-Mobile.

Okay, this problem probably effects many carriers. I don’t know. I want the ability to block certain numbers from calling/texting me. I mean really, I was getting texts from this.. person.. and I had no idea who they were. I called customer service and asked if I could prevent this person from texting me. Their suggestion? “We could change your number for $15.99 that has to be paid upfront.” Seriously. How hard is it to add that to the network structure? Simply a check to see if incoming data (whether it be SMS/MMS/phone call) is coming from a phone number that is on the intended recipient’s block list. Boo T-Mobile.. and probably most providers.

So I think in a year and half when my contract is over, I’ll be getting an iPhone. Maybe. The plans are a little expensive. We’ll see.