Stupidest Google Groups Message I Have Ever Found
May 24I understand that google groups has upped the number of permissions that people can tweak. That way, you have separate permissions to join, post, reply, etc. If you want to be a nazi in your group, they give you the power. However, I came across the most ludicrous message I have seen from any google application:
“You do not have permission to leave this forum.”
And just so that folks don’t think I’m just making it up, I took a screenshot.
Now, I know that Google Groups isn’t the most feature rich forum software out there, nor is it the most feature rich newsgroup software. Unfortunately, I have now relegated this to “The place where the retard Google devs get to play.” This is because, whomever thought that this was an appropriate message or rule to make, falls into that category.
(PS – Sorry if I insulted any special needs kids. Just know that you can make fun of some of the Google developers now.)
Phone/Tablet wars heat up! But why?
Jan 03
So at this point, I’m just entertained by all of the big companies attempting to jump into the cell phone/tablet field. I assume they think there is some form of gold mine there. Not entirely sure why. Apple did a great job honing in on the future. I’m not an Apple fanboy, but they did hit the nail on the head with the iPhone and iPad. Several companies had tried and failed and they did a decent job of making these devices useful. Apple is making a bit of money from their App Store, but they make much more on hardware. Especially with the Ipads and Iphones. Google could care less about the OS. They just see that as overhead to make everyone use their other products, such as Maps (it works. We’re addicted). Everyone else is just trying to get on the bandwagon and they don’t know why.
Blackberry Re-Enters the Game
Blackberry is trying to make another version of their own OS. This is ultimately going to fail. Most of us don’t really need an analyst to tell us that (Here’s one anyways.) My opinion is that they should understand the market and know why users used Blackberry in the first place, which was because it was so well tied into their email. With a Blackberry server in a corporate environment, you were tied into EVERYTHING. Licensing was reasonable, especially when you consider how much Exchange costs. So, this allowed people to be able to crank through emails, even when on road trips. Now that phones have improved past the point of just handling emails, Blackberry wants in on all of that too. Common case of overreach. You should OWN the email market. Make sure that all Blackberry phones are based on Android, and make some apps. Make sure that everyone has those nice keyboards, cause it’s still supported in Android. And just make sure that your crap works. Then you can leverage both the email functionality that you’d created and the infrastructure will be how you make the profit. Plus, people can play whatever animal projectile games that they want without worrying about whether it’s compatible. But they probably won’t. They’ll probably keep driving forward on their new OS and the company will (figuratively) burn to the ground.
Microsoft Clings to Life
Windows could be an awesome platform. It has such wonderful ties to the XBox market and gaming. The UI on their phones is amazing. They did a solid job of that. But it won’t survive either. Why? Because they screw developers, the people who choose whether or not to support the ecosystem. Even while people are using the OS and pleading for apps, Microsoft is burning bridges left and right with their hardware providers, trying to get a product out. Why work with them, right? “Apple is making their own hardware, and they make a profit. Let’s do that!” Yeah, but Apple, though they have done a good job of making an OS layer now, is a hardware company. They know it. Microsoft is not. They are a software company. Leave the hardware to the hardware guys. If you want to get direction, work with them. That’s what Google did with Asus to make the Nexus/Transformer and what it did with Samsung to make the Galaxy tablets. But here’s the biggest issue that I have with Microsoft. They are still trying to make money off of a product that the competition is offering for free. The Windows tablets come with Windows RT, which is a crap version of Windows that they won’t even let their office suite run on (though the processor will handle it). Seriously, you can’t even get email on their base model Surface tablets. They tell you in the store to forward all of your mail to Outlook.com. Yeah, that’s going to happen. Instead, they are trying to make more money by getting us to either use the Microsoft Live services or by upgrading to their top-of-the-line surface table with the full version of Windows Pro. But that thing’s going to cost like $1000. Why would I pay so much for a tablet when I could just as easily buy a laptop with touch screen and solid state drive? At that point, the laptop will be lighter, have 500GB+ of HD (instead of 64GB that they are offering on the surface) and a high quality processor and video card, and will last no longer than a laptop for battery life. What’s the point Microsoft? Well, if you can’t win, why not whine? Microsoft is taking some funny approaches to get people to use their products again. Truthfully, I hope that the company does a major reorganization so that we can get some decent products out of them again. They are too big to fail, so a re-org is all we can hope for.
Ubuntu, the New Kid on the Block
Now Ubuntu is joining. I don’t necessarily see it as a bad thing to finally get Linux on a tablet, but since you have to buy a tablet with either Apple iOS, Android, or Microsoft Windows on it, why are we going to wipe out a perfectly supported OS for an unsupported one? It just seems like such a waste. That is, unless you purchase support from Canonical. This is a fully open source company that makes most of their money off of support costs and consulting. I’m sure they can increase support of tablets, but I’m not entirely sure how much market share can be gained and how much profit to expect from this. It might be a bit easier to make a tablet into something that is less consumer driven and more producer driven, but that is yet to be seen.
And My Lack of Understanding
So, we know that iOS and Android are sticking around. Because their business model makes sense. iOS helps sell Apple hardware. Android sells Google services. The rest of them… all I ask is “why”?
Annoyed With LinkedIn
Dec 11
OK, so Linked-In just sent me an email that pretty much matched Mr. Mamechenkov’s post:
LinkedIn “improved” profile | Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov.
So, I’m rightly agitated. I understand that LinkedIn is cutting edge technology, but changing a public facing API and giving the public a grand total of 5 minutes to change from the deprecated code before the stuff stops working? Not exactly professional guys. I know you told folks that you’d be redesigning the pages, but that’s not the same.
Also, I’m in the same place that was mentioned in this article. My hosted GitHub projects were being shared on LinkedIn, giving a pretty decent cross-section of my abilities as a developer. This is pretty much the only reason I even have a LinkedIn account. I was able to create a link to it in the “My webpages” section, but that’s not exactly the same.
Luckily, I was able to find a plugin that posts my new stuff via the JetPack tools for reposting my WordPress publications. We’ll see if that works.
Update (12/11/2012 2:50pm): The Jetpack plugin seems to be working with the WordPress publications. It’s not formatted very nicely in the LinkedIn output, but it works. Looks like they are trying to be more like facebook and have a running timeline.
IPhone Security woes
Sep 12So, my girlfriend found an iPhone in the bathroom in our building yesterday. I had no idea who’s it was, but I didn’t want to leave it there. So, I started playing with it to find out how to return it to the person. First off, it was locked.
Seems reasonable. I lock my Samsung Galaxy as well. Don’t want people getting into my stuff just because they found my phone.
My girlfriend has an iPhone too, so I tried looking at the pictures. Maybe I’d recognize the girl in the building. Nope. Apple had done a good job of locking that out too.
Can’t knock them for that either.
There’s only one button on the phone (other than the power button), so I pushed it. It brought up Siri. Totally forgot about Siri! Awesome.
So I said “Who am I?”
That’s when things got interesting. Siri brought up the contact associated with the owner.
But notice that this is not just the name and some additional contact info, but everything. I now had this girls name, all of her email addresses, all her phone numbers, her home and work addresses, and best of all… she stored all of her passwords in this contact! Now, being the nice guy that I am, I didn’t jot down all of her passwords or anything. But when I emailed her and she picked up her phone, she was freaked out. She had no idea how I got her contact info. So I showed her.
Turns out, Siri can look up EVERYTHING. So I tried it with my girlfriends phone. I just said “find Justin.” It immediately opened a list of contacts with that first name. No password required. F’ing ridiculous! Turns out you can lock Siri, as I found here:
http://www.macworld.com/article/1163055/how_to_prevent_siri_access_while_your_iphone_4s_is_locked.html
OK… now if I do that… how am I supposed to find out who this phone belongs to?!?! Turns out… there is no way. Found that out in this article:
http://www.macworld.com/article/1163204/what_to_do_if_you_find_a_lost_iphone.html
Suddenly, I was very pleased by the fact that I have an Android. This is what my lock screen is (which allows nothing to happen without unlocking first and has the contact info that I want):
I hate you Apple. Why don’t you stop wasting your time suing folks, losing your customer’s data or account information and price fixing, and maybe put some of that giant cash of money into fixing your products’ holes. OK, I love my Macbook Retina, but I still hate you Apple. Enjoy your product release for iPhone 5!
Illustrator CS4 Design Example of Polaroids on a Page
Apr 15
The joy of my girlfriend being a teacher is that schools try to do things and have no resources to do them. Is it bad management? Oh yeah. But what are we going to do? Let kids suffer because people are lazy and inefficient? I digress. My point was that I often get dragged into doing little projects for free for my girlfriend because of lack of resources (see German Events for examples of a “small” project I got dragged into – which included that website). I don’t usually mind, since it keeps her happy. This most recent one was a flyer to encourage freshman to pursue German language at George Mason University. It had a cool effect that I had sorta seen before with polaroid pictures represented as marketing material.
If you want to check out the flyer, and how it can turn into something cool, here’s the PDF: GermanFlyer-web. This will give you a way to do it yourself, should you like this design and want the “polaroid effect” on a flyer of your own.
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