21
Feb 10
After years paying for my monthly subscription, I decided to call it quits.
More than one year ago I even decided to upgrade from a basic 5 slots ($ 9.99/mo) to a 10 slots ($ 19.99) in order to have more books on my virtual shelf.
It looked amazing in the beginning, and to be fair to O’Reilly, it turned out to be quite useful many times.
Why canceling then?
Because in the end, like for many other subscriptions, you don’t get what you pay for.
You get 5 download tokens a month (on renewal) and you can use them within 90 days.
Most of the books don’t allow a full download but a chapter based (usually one token per chapter) download.
Goes without explaining (do the math yourself) that you can never have more than 15 tokens, and how many programming/technology books have less than 15 chapters?
Quite a few, to be honest.
But…
When a book has less than 15 chapters, the download policy changes in order to f**k with you.
You can download on a sub-chapter base.
I mean… are you serious?
I was still determined to close my account so, in order to at least use some of the tokens, I had to search for a book that had both chapter based download and less than 15 chapters.
I found it and I can assure you it’s of very little interest to me (and probably to most of you out there)
Programming the iPhone user Experience
Well, at least I used 9/15 tokens.
Time to cancel.
At least I had a chance to leave a comment on the reason for ending my subscription.
Here it is in all its mean glory:
“for $23+/mo you could just change your download rules.
users like me have been paying for a long time and every now and then they’d love to be treated like paying customers and get something more than 5 tokens/mo that expire in 90 days.
most of your books aren’t downloadable as a whole and when the chapters are less than 15 (max amount of tokens you can possibly allow without shelling extra cash), magic happens: you can’t download chapters but portions of chapters.
this brings the token count required to download a book to more than 20.
and what about the BS of skipping parts of chapter?
I’ll keep buying your printed books because they are of really good quality, but I seriously doubt I’ll get back to safari bookshelf or that I’ll refer someone else.”
thanks for the ride
ubi de feo”
Popularity: 2% [?]
27
Jul 09
Today I built this cable out of boredom.
I wanted to test my Eclipse-AVR setup to program an ATtiny13 and realized that I always had to make some crazy jumper connections every time I wanted to use a new µ.
Why didn’t I think of this earlier?
Probably because we just worked with a few Atmel and I had my own sockets for each of them.
Now I’m in hacker mood and want to really learn the guts of AVR µs.
hope you’ll like the idea.
I basically used 2 different diameter heat-shrink tubes.
- the first one is to make the wire and the pin tight together and to isolate against unwanted shorts,
- the second one is larger and I wrote on it using a really thin pen before shrinking.
it’s proven to be working really well.
update:
this version has red and black for VCC and GND and is much longer, as I noticed the former one required the AVRISP to be really close to the µ and sometimes it’s just not possible if you have a lot lying around on the same board.
and finally
Popularity: 4% [?]
12
Jan 09
Upon carefully watching Palm’s keynote introducing the Pre at CES, I’ve been thinking about nothing but that little toy.
I’m quite bummed by the lack of information about the SDK.
The emphasis has been placed on the fact that millions of coders (if we can really address HTML/CSS/JS programmers that way) will be able to program for the webOS and Mojo.
Of course I’m wondering how much will be possible using those techniques and languages.
Will that mean you won’t have graphic acceleration for your games?
What if a developer wants to port a graphic app that uses double-buffering?
How is a programmer going to deal with sound?
That’s still all to be seen.
We can’t but patiently wait.
I’ll stick to my wonderful E71 for now, and keep using iPhone as a backup device and to play with.
For a more thorough examination I’d like to link to Rui Carmo’s take on the device.
I always treasure his opinions.
Popularity: 1% [?]
31
May 08
I was sent a link by a friend (Greg) to show his latest work in interior and furniture design.
I find his products amazingly beautiful, and seeing how friendly the .Mac interface for gallery looked on safari, decided to take a look at how they were rendered on iPhone.
this is the result,
perfectly integrated like the camera roll or the sync-ed photos.
is this another sign of .mac targeting mobile (iPhone/iPod touch) more and more?
Popularity: 3% [?]
28
Mar 08
After about 2 days trying to follow the wiki on Google Code iphone-dev with no success at all, I decided to finally look around and see if someone had succeeded in writing a proper how-to to install the unofficial SDK for jailbroken iPhone.
That’s right, Apple, I’m not content with the official one, especially for the proof of concept applications we’re trying to demo.
a search reported this amazing step-by-step tutorial on Cocoa Machine on installing the toolchain (I skipped some steps, as parts were already successfully installed via the wiki on iphone-dev), and finished compiling/installing the whole.
what’s really great about this guide, is that the author patched the XCode templates as well, and is giving instructions on how to modify the Makefile for code downloaded from code.google.com or others.
everything explained.
it’s now time for me to get to it.
Popularity: 1% [?]
28
Mar 08
Having had the chance to appreciate this man’s writing in his book “the nudist on the late shift” (which I recommend to every geek around),
I was reading through his website in search of trivia and other funnies.
I stubled upon the Apology Engine.
wonderful.
Popularity: 1% [?]
14
Mar 08
we finally moved out of Plesk :)
thanks rick
Popularity: 1% [?]
10
Mar 08
This morning I went checking my Flickr recent activity and found a comment.
unbelievable.
and the person’s account pictures are even creepier
Popularity: 2% [?]
08
Mar 08
Interesting quick post by Daron Bauman on Kottke,
about the difficulty of the english language
Four words that prove how difficult the English language is: lose, loose, chose, choose.
Update: Doug points out more: bough, cough, dough, rough, through.
being a non native english speaking person (I’m italian and we’re known as not the best english speakers on the globe),
I found myself facing one of the words that I think belongs to the longest list of this kind.
the word is “steak”, and in amsterdam there’s plenty of “steak houses”.
we italians end up asking for something that is closer to “stick” than “steak”.
we tend to pronounce the “ea” group as it is in the word “weak”.
this list of words is my favorite as it takes to our concerns
- stake > OK
- skate > OK
- wake > OK
- weak > OK
- break > can live with it but…
- steak > ???
damn you, english language!
Popularity: 1% [?]
07
Mar 08
Why hasn’t anyone asked about this?
- You can test your application on an iPhone/iPod Touch through the dock cable.
- Remote debug and such
- performance tuning
- use the iPhone/iPod Touch as a real platform for your app (no Emulators etc).
can you “leave” the app on the device and run it on the go?
I think for a developer this is very important.
You can do it on Symbian with developer certificates tied to your IMEI, and you can do it with J2ME.
IS IT GOING TO BE POSSIBLE ON THE IPHONE???
[update]: it is possible.
thank you saver but we knew it already :)
Popularity: 1% [?]
04
Mar 08
If you were patient enough and didn’t listen to the hype of
- 3.9 is the official Ziphone BootLoader
- 3.9 is the future
- we really really really need LocateMe function to work
and such, you can finally enjoy a safe iPhone BL downgrade to a 3.9FakeBlank (because it contains a few blanked out bytes 0xFF that allow for some really geeky magic).
I think this is just great news.
I’m going to downgrade later today and feel safer.
patience is golden ;)
on Hackint0sh
UPDATE:
I’ve successfully run my iPhone through a new automating app that does all is needed automatically.
Thread on Hackint0sh
this process worked beautifully and painlessly for me.
now I have BL 3.6fakeblank, FW 1.1.4, BB 04.04.05_G, but can get back to the original BL 4.6 when I want.
Popularity: 1% [?]
29
Feb 08
Although I think these are somewhat funny and well produced,
I have to say this to my friends at W+K:
It DOESN’T taste like Coke.
come on…
it tastes like Coke Light… just slightly different.
watch the ads at Passion’s site
Popularity: 1% [?]
29
Feb 08
I really dig this now.
maybe because it’s fresh out :)
ChalkWork on MezzoBlue
please note that in the install instructions you have something to correct for the theme to be visible.
where it says to install in
/var/root/Library/SummerBoard/Themes
this only works on older os revisions
on 1.1.3 (and think 1.1.2 as well) the themes are in
/var/mobile/Library/SummerBoard/Themes
of course being /var a symlink to another directory, the full system path is
/private/var/mobile/Library/SummerBoard/Themes
but you don’t need to know this.
enjoy my screenshots :)
Popularity: 2% [?]
27
Feb 08
At yesterday’s announcement of the new MacBook Pro, I had a “finally!” moment when I read that the right Enter key was deprecated in favor of another Option (ALT) key on the right side of the keyboard.
If you’re a keyboard freak as I am, you have probably cursed Apple for this missing feature.
Well… it seems that you’re now able to shell some cash out and get a new laptop and throw away the one you bought 9 days ago.
Just Kidding.
Mine is from last august and this is just a tease to whoever bought one last week :D
A bit happy for the newcomers and a bit disappointed for myself, I started wondering whether there’s some utility out there that can do the same.
Well… I stubled upon this great japanese dude who programmed one for his own usage (Emacs etc) and made it available to the public.
Greet KeyRemap4Macbook, everyone.
The utility is confirmed to work on MacBook/MacBook Pro and Mac Mini (not sure which) and is Universal Binary.
I can confirm it works on my MBP 2.4
Personal usage scenario:
having Spaces remapped to ALT rather than CTRL, having a right ALT key makes me super happy (and will soon give me RSI)
below a screenshot of the configuration I used.
Popularity: 6% [?]
25
Feb 08
Since I started IdontNeedYouTube.com, I had to face a little annoying detail of posting from the “share” link on YouTube.
The way the post is formatted is not cleanly parsed by xmlrpc.php on WordPress.
Basically the title is not recognized and is instead part of the post body.
the way I solved it:
- duplicate xmlrpc.php
- call it xmlrpc_custom.php (the main reason is preventing overwriting when you update WordPress… which is lately happening very often)
- look for the function blogger_newPost
at about line 844 you can find $post_author
paste this snippet of code
$htVar=html_entity_decode($content);
if($stIndx=strpos($htVar,">")+1){
$enIndx=strpos($htVar,"");
$post_title=(substr($htVar,$stIndx,$enIndx-3));
$content=substr($content,$enIndx+5,strlen($htVar)-1);
}
right after
$post_title = xmlrpc_getposttitle($content);
now you just have to change the script URL in your YouTube blog settings.
I’m quite sure this could be done easily with RegExp, but I really never had time to learn all that complicated stuff.
enjoy
Popularity: 1% [?]