jerakeen.tumblr

Assume that the iPhone is sim-locked to AT&T (or O2 in this country). When the iPhone 2 arrives, can I move my SIM into one and avoid another 18-month lock-in? Or are Apple going to move beyond mere provider-level locking on this one?

back when nerds were in charge of the internet, you couldn’t use it to find childhood pictures of us.

Facebook invented, and Google have just generalized, an entirely new class of application. Take Dopplr. It’s a social network that does trip tracking and coincidences. This is completely backwards - the social network stuff is overhead that we have to implement so that we can keep trips private and restrict the list of coincidences that you have to manage. Dopplr should really only be about the trips.

Facebook and Google have suddenly enabled a class of application that is the interesting half of this - I can think about the functionality, and sit in someone else’s social network while I do it.

Paul Mison makes an interesting distinction between profile-centric and media-centric social networking services - Facebook being profile-centric and Dopplr, or Flickr, say, being media-centric. This evolution benefits both media-centric services (because they can avoid having to implement all that profile-editing overhead) and profile-centric ones, because they get events to drive return visits. Even heavyweight media items that take a bit of effort (a Flickr photo upload, a long-form blog post) tend to have lighter things attached (comments, usually), and these do very well at driving return traffic.

My house contains many clocks. Most of them are attached to computers and tend to sort themselves out when the clocks go back. A couple are manual and need poking at by hand, which isn’t really a chore till you have a house full of them. But the wall clock in the kitchen is Magic - it just needs a battery, then it’ll go pick up the time from Rugby and set itself. It’ll automatically adjust itself when the clocks go forwards and back. It has no controls at all, as they’re not needed.

This means that when it fails, it fails particularly badly. It’s currently alternating between just spinning round and round quickly, and telling a time about two hours in the future. And of course, I can do nothing about this. I may replace it with something stupider.

Grrr. If you require, in your application_helper, a gem that isn’t installed, then that helper doesn’t get compiled or included. And no error message is printed. It just silently isn’t made available to your templates.

$ dscacheutil -flushcache

It’s been pointed out that I could consider Twitter a microblogging platform, and that many people do. But (a) I prefer to keep twitter an ambient socialability thing, and (b) the 140 character limit is just too annoyingly constraining.

No longer syndicating anything into the tumblr feed. Seems like a mis-use of it, frankly. Let’s see if I can’t put real things here.