Bill’s iPod Spends a Night on the Town
As most people know, I don’t have a cell phone. You people don’t call me as it is; you don’t need more access to me. When I head out the door, I do usually take me iPod Touch with me. If you’re unfamiliar with those, they are just like the iPhone but with no phone (or, currently, camera).
So, Friday night I took my iPod with me as usual. I was running a little late because my Motorola DSL modem purchased last year after Ike killed my last modem died an early death. I took my bicycle out as I usually do. I ride the bicycle for a variety of reasons: i need the exercise, it’s really not that far from the Heights to Montrose or Midtown, parking is never an issue.
My first stop, and as late as a few hours earlier my only planned stop, was at Anvil. A relatively new bar in the Montrose area, it specializes in mixed drinks. So, that’s what I had. Of course riding your bike a few miles will build up a thirst, and liquor drinks aren’t necessarily ideal for that. I should have asked for some water as well, but they were already slammed with the happy hour + birthday wishes for Romy crowd, and I didn’t.
But I did enjoy some great drinks: Scofflaw, which was quite tasty with rye wiskey; Blood & Sand, another too easy to drink this time centered around Scotch; i tried to slow myself up with a Gimlet but that didn’t quite work; then finally the Corn ‘n Oil with blackstrap rum was a sipper. The Anvil has free wi-fi as most of Houston does. It’s locked, but the password is free for asking. My iPod enjoyed checking it’s email and twittering a few times.
The intersection of friends with Romy is interesting, and I got to chat with Tracey, Renee, Lindsey (whom I hadn’t seen in years), Katie, C. Matusow who had a new twitter account, and briefly said hi to Hillary G, and quite a few others. I succeeded in exiting for under $30, which was amazing. Just before I’d left the house I noticed that Jack Schultz commented that Sean Refer was playing at the West Alabama Ice House. So, I extended my evening and headed there.
I ran into Ron, who poured me some of his Irish Wiskey, saying he owed me for hosting an excellent Christmas party. I ordered a Pine Bark and ran into Tracy V, and sat and talked to her.
West Alabama Ice House doesn’t have a wi-fi of it’s own, but it’s surrounded by dense residence and businesses, so there is usually an open signal there. 
Soon, my iPod chirped at me with some new email. I scanned it and saw a message from Tricia that it was Ken Wall’s birthday at the Continental. So, though I had not planned to head there, I couldn’t miss that.
I locked up the bike out front, and went in to say hi to Ken, Bob, Adam, and quite a few others. The Light Rock Express was playing outside, another band inside, and apparently Ken was picking up the bar tab. Even Becky and Steve W. road tripped from Austin.
My iPod always feels lonely at the Continental Club because they are sans wi-fi. I was a few blocks down the road when I realized I didn’t have it in my breast pocket. I turned around and looked a few places with no luck. I headed off again also without one of the keys I needed, but knowing how to bypass the apartment “security” gate.
In the morning I realized I may have dropped the iPod in the bushes while leaning over to unlock the bike. I went back to check for it, but it was not there.
However, when I got home there was a message from Tom M. who lived in midtown that he had found it on his morning walk, 6 blocks from where I dropped it. My iPod had also sent an email to Dana about an hour before Tom found it. A little after noon I met up with Tom and retrieved my tired iPod and took it home to recharge him, with only a few more character scratches to show for it.
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NYT Twitter Article
I think this NYT Article (Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens.) misses the mark drastically and sows trite generalisms.
“Twitter’s unparalleled explosion in popularity has been driven by a decidedly older group. That success has shattered a widely held belief that young people lead the way to popularizing innovations.”
Who decided they were older? (Oh, for one and Industry Analyst – Never trust an Industry Analyst, they study the past.) I’d say the popularity has been driven by the age group that came of age with computers and the Internet. Who widely holds this belief? Has this belief really been shattered? For a short article with a lot of mouth and not a lot of money (i.e. column inches), Claire Cain Miller.
The only thing “youth tech” about Twitter is it’s cost. Free is in their ballpark. So it’s obviously other forces that have kept them from overwhelming it. I think you could actually do quite a bit of sociological work on the exact factors, but I’ll take a swing at some possibilities and let the academics start there and prove me wrong (or partially right).
First, younger children are protected by their parents from Internet Boogey Men. Some children are directed, others scared into submission, some over-the-shoulder chaperoned. Twitter began and evolved in a very raw form. Not one that in any way was child friendly. And little flash (other than the cute name and bird) or content (other than initially adult techies, and later adult celebrities – Aston Kutcher aside) to attract them.
I think the main reasons are ones of psychology and sociology. (And Miller covers these toward the end of her article.) Even though Twitter accounts can be locked up, the service works best in the open. Children spend most of their waking hours experiencing life directly with their friend network. Jim and Jane were both in Miss Johnson’s English class when she tripped and fell, they don’t need to tweet about it, they’re going to laugh about it together. And the hormone riddled youth are more about sharing secrets and are still learning social skills by doing that, and usually poorly.
When we’re five, the world goes all the way to the end of the block. When we’re teenagers it goes several miles past the high school. As we age or knowledge and interest expand but most often into thinner and thinner specialties. To share common honed interests our connection tentacle out across the state, nation, and world. It takes a certain amount of raw years to get to that point.
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So, typical of most newspaper articles, the first two paragraphs made me think Miller was a mindless bozo who totally missed the mark, and the remainder of the article settled down, was interesting, and avoided it’s overstated initial assertions. I’m not sure if today’s editors do this, or if it’s self editing/censoring by writers.
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Checkers FS5 Free Pulled From Store
After waiting for Checkers to be pushed into the store from the queue, and watching it’s soft launch this weekend, we noticed some anomalies in the ratings. We’ve come to have certain expectations of the ratings.
The Checkers FS5 Free was receiving an inordinate number of low ratings. No comments explaining or support emails about it. Unfortunately, this is typical of users. Only one of our team members has a 2.0 device we can use for testing. He launched it and immediately found the problem. A slight timing issue with some of Apple’s libraries causes the game to hang when you start to play it.
There are still quite a few 2.x iPod Touches, and they are particular in their game play. We had to make the decision on whether to pull it or not, it was touch, but that’s what we decided to do. The simple workaround should be back in the app store queue by the end of the day, but it may be a while before it sees the light of day in the app store.
We’re sorry for the delay, and in the mean time if you want our checkers you’ll have to pay for it.
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Bill even looks huge from space
There is a hurricane named Bill this year. It was only inevitable that this would show up in my in-box from a friend:
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Versions and svn merge
We had a project that included extern links to many subprojects. (They were subprojects because we use them across several projects.) The subjects had a iPhone 3.0 branch created for them, and developed against the new SDK. Out of laziness, we redirected the extern links to the 3.0 branch when it was desired.
In reality, we should have created a 2.x branch, and forced existing apps to change what they were looking at or use the new 3.0 code. But we didn’t.
Now, it was time to merge the 3.0 branch back into the trunk of our development. Version provides a realy nice GUI to most of your day-to-day svn needs. But a major merge is not an everyday need, and needs some human interaction. (Though I do think they could supply a “merge repository branch X into workarea branch Y, and let me handle it from there”.)
The first thing to do is change the external settings to where you want them to be pointing when you’re done, trunk in our case. You can do this from Versions in the externals part of the inspector. Then re synchronize the project. At this point it likely won’t build. We need to move the code from the branch repository into our trunk work area.
One trick before merging is determining at what point the branch split from the trunk or was last copied from the trunk. I have a work area with the entire subproject branching structure sync’ed to it and you can select each of the two and show their history, and compare the commits. The last common commit is what you are interested in. Mine was 158.
so, you’ve changed directory to the trunk work area, the money command is:
svn merge -r 158:HEAD <branch-workarea-path> --username <remoteuserid>
it will ask your password more than once, keep giving it,
it may ask you a merge question, i always postpone, it provides standard in-file diffs you need to handle,
Select: (p) postpone, (df) diff-full, (e) edit,
(h) help for more options: p
After handling the diffs, check it in.
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