February 1, 2010

It’s doubtful that anybody reading this blog missed the news that Apple finally took the wraps off their much rumored tablet: the iPad. Trouble is, a bunch of folks seem to be upset about the features and specs, or something that made the buzz machine go meh. It’s just a bigger iPhone, complain the privileged [...]
Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Politics & Controversy, Technology |
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July 15, 2008

I’ve learned to ignore contests on the web. Banner ads that promise prizes if I click the right pixel are the least offensive, but the contests that have me creating content (and then force me to give up my copyright to it) for another person’s gain infuriate me. So when I saw author and experience [...]
Posted in Technology |
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May 31, 2007
I’ve been working on MySQL optimization for a while, and though there’s still more to done on that front, I’ve gotten to the point where the the cumulative query times make up less than half of the page generation time. So I’m optimizing code when the solution is obvious (and I hope to rope Zach [...]
Posted in Technology |
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January 8, 2006
A while ago I reported on the Pew Internet Project‘s November 2005 report on increased use of search engines. Here’s what I had to say at the time: On an average day, about 94 million American adults use the internet; 77% will use email, 63% will use a search engine. Among all the online activities [...]
Posted in Libraries & Networked Information |
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November 8, 2005
Jenny Levine alerted me to the Pew Internet & American Life Project report on teens as both content creators and consumers. It turns out that teens, and teen girls especially, are highly active online IMing, sharing photos, blogging, reading and commenting on other’s blogs, and gaming. An especially strong trend in this group is the [...]
Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology |
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January 20, 2013
By way of update on my earlier post after researching options for AT&T iPhone users in Europe (with an unlocked phone), I ended up not bothering with local SIM cards in either The Netherlands or France. A savvy user should be able to find a local pay as you go SIM plan that’s less expensive [...]
Posted in Technology, Travel |
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September 9, 2012

There’s uncertain talk of a European trip coming up, so I’m making nonspecific preparations for it. One of the questions I have is how to avoid hefty roaming charges from AT&T. In previous trips abroad I’d purchased overseas voice and data add-ons so I could use my iPhone. That works, up to a point. On my [...]
Posted in Travel |
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August 14, 2011

Twitter’s mobile site rocks on my iPhone. Especially worth noting: they’ve figured out how to pin their header to the top while scrolling the content in the middle. They’re also using pushState() and other cool tricks to make the experience feel very native, but the scroll behavior is rare among web apps on iOS. Kent [...]
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March 16, 2010
One lesson here is that a simple but well-done web app [...] can be vastly superior to a full-fledged but terrible iPhone application. Usability Nightmare: The My.SXSW iPhone App.
Posted in Blink, Technology |
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April 30, 2009
A caller to Clark Howard’s CNN show complains of being billed $62,000 by his cell phone provider for data usage. And Oklahoman Billie Parks has filed suit over a $5,000 bill.
Posted in Dispatches |
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March 31, 2009
Stefan Savage, speaking in a segment on March 13′s On The Media, asked: The question I like to ask people is, what are you going to do to the highway system to reduce crime. And when you put it that way, it sounds absolutely ridiculous, because while criminals do use the highway, no rational person [...]
Posted in Politics & Controversy, Technology |
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March 11, 2009

I’m flying Virgin America from BOS to SFO, and apparently all their planes on that route offer in-flight internet via Gogo. $12.95 buys 3Mbps down and 300Kbps up (at least early on when nobody else seemed to be using it). I can get my iPhone online for only 8 bucks, but as far as I [...]
Posted in Dispatches, Technology |
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February 24, 2009
You’d think the top search results on the matter would be newer than 1999, but that’s where you’ll find this NYT article and PubLaw item story, both from precambrian times. Worse, both of those articles suggest that my links to them may not be entirely kosher. The problem is probably that US courts have not [...]
Posted in Dispatches, Libraries & Networked Information, Politics & Controversy, Technology |
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December 2, 2008
If you’re already building web apps, you might wonder why you should bother to build an iPhone native app. The short answer is that you might not need to, but you should still optimize the app for iPhones. Native-looking chrome Set these in the head: // set a custom icon for when a user bookmarks [...]
Posted in Technology |
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September 22, 2008
This two year old post about Rasmus Lerdorf’s PHP scaling tips (slides) is interesting in the context of what we’ve learned since then. APC now seems common, and it’s supposedly built-in to PHP6. Still, I’d be interested in seeing an update. Are MySQL prepared statements still slow? And that’s where Rasmus’ latest presentation comes in. [...]
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The original iPod *was* lame.
Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Politics & Controversy, Technology | Leave a Comment »