A grey, and relatively cold Memorial Day weekend here in Alameda. It actually rained a little on Saturday, was blustery and cold on Sunday and only a little better for Monday.
Today, of course, was back to blue skies and sunshine.
The photo was taken in the small playground area attached to the Ruby Bridges Elementary School here in Bayport, Alameda (even though Flickr still thinks that all the photos I take in Alameda are actually from Oakland).
How can the AT&T network have so many dead spots in the heart of one of the most high-tech areas on the planet?
And look at the signal strength – I had 4 our of 5 bars. I guess when they say more bars in more places they took it literally: the signal is strong, but the service is still unavailable.
Uploaded some photos from my visit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium a few weeks back (heading home from Big Sur). The frogs were something I hadn’t seen there before. In the Flickr stream though you’ll find some jellyfish photos. What visit to the Monterey aquarium would be complete without the clichéd orange and blue jellyfish? But there are also some other types from the Jellies as art exhibition area that you might not have seen.
Oh, and don’t miss the otter photos.
One of the historic trolleys that Muni operates in San Francisco, running along the Embarcadero and up Market street. This one is an Italian car, from Milan.
It was parked along the Embarcadero tonight as I crossed over to get to the ferry. In the background you can see the Bay Bridge.
Tried to blog about this a couple of days ago, but that was when Flickr was having problems, and blog posting seemed to be one of the things that wasn’t working!
Schmap have now launched a version of their online city/region guides formatted for the iPhone. This is a very handy tool since you can access it over the iPhone’s cellular connection while you’re actually traveling (I don’t normally carry my laptop around when on vacation, but I do take my mobile phone with me).
No special URL needed (though I’d like it if one was available); the site will automatically give you the iPhone version when you visit from Mobile Safari.
Looks like the folks at Flickr are having a busy Monday! There have been site problems all morning as they try to stitch everything back together. The top of every page currently reads “Seeing various site problems? We know! Check this forum topic.” And the forum starts with this information:
Lots of people blaming the recent addition of video support to Flickr, though there’s no evidence that this is actually related so far.
Update: The forum thread about this makes for some interesting reading for those thinking about operating a large consumer facing web application. Kudos to the Flickr staff, especially Kevin who is posting the Flickr updates to the thread, for their restraint!
Finally got around to uploading some of the photos from our Earth Day weekend trip to Oakland Zoo. Along with the shots of the white handed gibbons (one of my favourite animals at the zoo), you will find shots of macaws, giraffes, elephants, zebra, tortoises, camels, meerkats, alligators, a stick insect and more in my new Oakland Zoo set.
Jason Kester has a very insightful post up on his blog this weekend about the use of the terms “magic” and “smart” to describe software tools & frameworks. And more importantly perhaps, about the features themselves, which are often anything but “magic” or “smart.”
The problem is that these features hide the real operations that are going on under the hood. It makes what are potentially complex, time-consuming and performance killing operations seem like a simple thing. They also make it next to impossible to work out when that is the case and when it isn’t. Since I’ve been looking at Ruby on Rails a little at the moment (it seems to be the most popular choice of web development language at the moment), I was interested to see Rails being listed there as well.
In my past I have seen similar problems with C++ (unexpected calls to copy constructors and conversion operators) and had to create coding standards that helped to catch these sorts of problems at compilation time rather than letting them get into executing code where it becomes next to impossible to track them down. That’s harder to do with things like Hibernate where the problem is caused by the abstraction itself, and it not just a symptom of powerful language features.
I installed a new app on my N95 the other day from the Nokia Beta Labs: Location Tagger. This is one of the things that should have been built into the camera application from day one on a GPS enabled phone, but I’m glad to see they’re catching up.
The photo on the right is my first test of this new feature. The photo was automatically geo-tagged (so, if you visit the photo’s page in Flickr, you can see it placed on a map). Flickr seems to be confused about the city (it thinks Alameda is Oakland!), but it shows up in the correct place on the map.
Why was I at Starbucks? Well, I stopped by to see whether AT&T had disabled the free Wi-Fi for iPhone users. The special free login page has indeed gone, replaced by the older iPhone login page, though it did still let me on using the iPhone credentials I had stored in my Devicescape account 🙂
Finally, I finally signed up for Twitter, and added the Twitter feed to the left column on the blog. Since it is connected to my IM client (Adium, for those wondering), I can send it short messages about what I’m up to, and they’ll end up here on the blog as well as on my Twitter page.
Well, to be more accurate, free for AT&T iPhone users. If you have your service through AT&T still, then you should get this login page when you connect to the attwifi SSID at Starbucks, or anywhere else. Enter your 10 digit AT&T mobile number and you’re online.
Devicescape users can add the special ‘AT&T Wi-Fi (iPhone)’ credential type to their account, and they will get online automatically.
There have been rumours around that the same will be enabled for anybody with an AT&T mobile data plan at some point; I expect the iPhone is being used as the test platform here since they already had mobile pages for the iPhone (my N95 still sees the full page).
Update, May 4, ’08: Seems that the web page has been taken down now (guess too many folks were abusing it by changing their browser agent string and getting online with non-iPhone devices).