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So today, Apple released an update to Leopard: 10.5.3. Plenty of bugfixes abound, but a new feature was snuck in: Google Contacts Synchronization. This allows you to keep your address book in sync between Google, your Mac, and your iPhone. I say this because the caveat of this new feature is that it’s only enabled for Mac users with an iPhone, but not for anyone else. This is absolutely nuts. Address Book has had Yahoo! synchronization since the beginning of Leopard, and I don’t see why Apple (or Google?) only enabled it for iPhone users…But worry not, fellow Mac users without iPhones, because Lifehacker comes to the rescue with a moderately-tricky edit for Mac users with any iPod. The steps are more-clearly outlined on the article, but you open a .plist file generated when you connect an iPod to iTunes, and lie to iTunes, saying it’s an iPhone, forcing Address Book to give you the option to sync with Google Contacts.If you’ve built up contacts on both services, expect about an hour of conflict resolution and duplicate deletion… oh joy. 

Just got back from a trip to Cancun for the weekend, and I’ve learned a few things:

• No matter how technologically advanced we get as a civilization, you still need to carry a pen.
• Laws should be written with some semblance of intelligence assumed in the people. Things move a lot quicker.
• I appreciate the ability of US Airports to publish their gate number assignments more than 50 minutes before flight time.
• I can appreciate why people get buzzed socially. Still don’t know if I enjoy it that much, though.
• It’s quite possible to walk around for 10 minutes and find 8 different USD-MXN exchange rates. It is also mathematically impossible to make any money playing the exchanging game between those vendors.
• The US Dollar is starting to suck.
• When relying on SPF50 suntan lotion, be sure you get every square inch of your body. I have an interesting sin(x)/4x shaped line down my back (with the 0 near my right shoulder)
• If you’re going to visit a foreign country, at least attempt to learn some aspect of the language before you visit. Baño, bien, y tu, para ti, and gato only take you so far.
• Bodyboarding is still freakin awesome.
• As is snorkeling. We saw 3 dolphins in 30m deep ocean!
• Take more shirts then you think you’ll need.
• The intracity buses in Cancun are 6.50 MXN, roughly 60 cents US. Freakin nuts!!

There’s probably a few more, but those are the ones I remembered to write down on my phone between planes.

Nine Inch Nails has released another album, this time completely free. It’s shakin up the music industry!!!

Of course, Trent has plans to sell physical CD’s and such, but the full album is available to download for free!

read more | digg story

It’s not the data that’s important, it’s the links between them that matter.

That’s one of my policies about data, especially now with relational databases allowing businesses and people to see the links between people. Advertisers don’t care who you are, they just care that one person has gone to X, Y, and Z places and that they must enjoy reading about C to advertise C to you. Police really don’t care what person you are, so long as they can identify you buying a gun, then holding up a liquor store, then going to a residence so they can arrest you. Doctors don’t need to know your name to know that you have the flu because you have D, E, and F symptoms. Given most circumstances where data is collected, the name of the person is irrelevant. It’s all about tying the data together.

Computers have allowed us to rapidly collect data, organize it into a standardizable format, and (most importantly) perform analysis on it. The Internet, merely a vast collection of information and links to other pieces of information, is the crowning achievement of interconnected data. Wikipedia, which makes linking between data dangerously easy, has been the source of many a curious perusal. Facebook, in particular, has been an excellent repository of links between people, pictures, messages, status updates, demographical data, and more! While Facebook has always made this information usable for advertisers, Facebook has revealed a new feature that is genuinely helpful (if not a little scary) to users.

Facebook calls it “People You May Know” (must be logged into Facebook to do anything with it), and it’s a very compelling feature in my opinion. Basically, Facebook takes your friends’ friends and finds the people that show up the most often. Their logic is that if many of your friends are friends with someone, then that person has a good chance of being your friend. Normally this would be a very hard thing to look at by hand, as you would need to compare something along the lines of n^3 people, where n is the amount of friends each person has. You take every single person I have as my friend, then for each of them, you have to take every one of their friends and see if they exist in all the other n lists of friends. Even using efficient algorithms, it’s an NP-complete problem. Assuming everyone on your friends list has 50 friends, that’s anywhere from 100,000 to 125,000 comparisons (assuming a good amount of efficiency on the programmer’s part about removing people once they’ve been matched from other friend’s lists). Of course, I currently have 282 friends, and I know of about 5 people on my friends list with over 400 friends, so this would take a LONG time.

Whatever crazy amount of processing power or super-efficient algorithms Facebook is using to find these common friends, it’s impressive. I’ve used the feature to add 5 new friends from high school and college. Of course this increases the work Facebook has to do when calculating my new “People You May Know”, but that’s not my problem . As soon as Facebook starts guessing my political philosophy based on the friends I keep (and they can, it’s easier than doing what they just did), then I may need to get out. But I don’t think I can very easily…

Wow, it’s funny. In Pidgin, one can view the Member Since information on any user on your buddy list (you might have been able to for some time, but I just noticed it). Apparently I’ve been on AIM since May 5th, 2002. Of course, I’ve been on the Internet for quite some time before that, but it’s interesting to take a look back. More than half my life, I’ve been on the Internet, and it’s impressive to see how it has grown since the original ARPANET. I distinctly remember an assignment in 5th grade where I had to track a few stocks. Back in the day, I’d have to get on AOL, a painstakingly slow process considering our Windows 95 machine. Then you had to browse for every individual stock (also slow).

Nowadays, with Google Finance, RSS, and internet enabled cell phones, that information would come to me at blazing speeds anywhere I was. There’s so much more out there, and so much more to be had. Let’s hope these next 6 years (and those to follow) provide similar enhancements

Today, the sequel to the widely-popular Super Smash Bros. Melee: Super Smash Bros Brawl, launched in the US. Getting an average of 96 out of 100 according to the major game review sites, it’s quite a great game! While I do not own a Wii, I’ve played both the Japanese import and the English version, and Brawl takes everything that Melee had, made it better or kept it the same, and added 9 more characters, many more items, and an extensive story-arc called “The Subspace Emissary” which makes a valiant attempt to spice up the otherwise shallow single player modes.

Read more

*UPDATE* After completing the download of the free album, Ghosts I, I’ve mirrored the album for download here. Enjoy *UPDATE*

So Trent Reznor, lead singer of Nine Inch Nails, has released a new instrumental album called Ghosts. A 4-volume album, it’s a sometimes-light, sometimes-heavy treat for NIN fans everywhere. But what’s more great than the material is the distribution method. There are 5 options for listening to this album:

1. The first volume (9 tracks) is available FOR FREE. That’s right, free. You can grab it from NIN’s official site (slow right now, but should be back up in the morning), or from various downloading sites such as The Pirate Bay.
2. All 4 albums are available as a download in 320 kbps MP3 (The highest quality MP3 available), or FLAC or Apple Lossless (larger, but exactly the same quality as a CD). Any of these options costs you 5 dollars.
3. A 2-cd preorder. 10$, and shipping sometime on or before April 8th, but you also get the above mentioned download.
4. A 75$ deluxe package, with the CD’s above, the entire album in multitrack format (for remixing to your heart’s desire), a BluRay DVD of stereo recordings, and a 48-page hardcover photo book. Also shipping soim
5. A 300$ Ultra-Deluxe (I kid you not) package, including everything above, 4 LP 180-gram vinyls, and two limited-edition Giclee prints, and more fabric slipcovers than you could hope for.

I’m excited. I’ve been trying to preorder the CD for a good 45 minutes now, but the site is just getting ROCKED. We’ll see if I get to order it.

I’m glad that Trent is free from a record label so he can do this stuff now. I can guarantee you that giving away an album for free is not something most record companies would allow. Let’s see how well this fares for the rest of the industry…..

As part of my job, I set up computer lab machines for students at my university. We don’t provide them the ability to store data on the computer, of course, so we encourage students to bring in flash drives.

Most students prefer to use the ‘safely remove hardware’ icon to remove their flash drives, which is good. However, I ran into a quandry: our newest machines (slim-factor Optiplexes) have the laptop-style removable DVD drives. Unfortunately, they show up in the remove hardware list as well. I wanted to remove the ability for students to unwillingly remove the DVD drive, but still be able to remove their flash drive.

Luckily a registry hack exists to solve this problem: http://forums.techarena.in/showthread.php?t=662383. Basically, you edit a registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\[busname]\....\Capabilities (adjusting as needed for the actual device, you may need to dig for a bit)
and either subtracting 4 if dividing the value by 8 results in 4,5,6, or 7, or ading 80h (1280) otherwise. Backup this registry key in a .reg file and add it to autoexec.bat

This should remove the device from the Safely Remove Hardware list, while still showing other devices.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/feb08/02-01CorpNewsPR.mspx

Quite simply, Microsoft is trying to buy out the internet search market to beat up on Google. Collusion of #2 and #3 in the search market may provide some more amicable competition, but Microsoft is just going to shove Yahoo’s services down our throats like Windows Messenger, Windows Live, Windows Desktop Search, etc. Imagine your stock Vista laptop loaded down with Yahoo! Music, Yahoo! Video, Yahoo! Address Book, Yahoo! Mail, etc….

Personally, if it allows appropriate synchronization of information in a controlled, safe format, I’m cool. Microsoft, Google, and Facebook have joined the Data Portability Group whose purpose is to create open and standard protocols for synchronizing and abstracting data. Syncable Address Books, Calendars, Mail, etc. is a good thing for mobile users, and the more accessible (and secure) data is, the better. If Microsoft and Yahoo! (Microhoo!?) start providing synchronization for Windows users, Google will have to follow suit. An interesting note: how is Yahoo’s content partnership with Apple going to change? The new version of Mac OSX Leopard allows for address book synchronization with Yahoo!, and if Apple and Microsoft start sharing data, I’m not looking forward to flying bacon.

While Yahoo! has not accepted the offer, Microsoft offered a price which is 165% of the current per-share price of Yahoo, so for the stockholder’s sake, Yahoo! will probably bite. We’ll see how Google reacts…

While for a different motivation than Apple’s iPhone Credit, Nintendo is giving away anti-slip rubber jackets for any new Wiimotes. This will hopefully prevent certain remote-slipping-related problems and reduce the sweaty feeling one gets after gripping the Wiimote for a long time (I can personally attest to this effect, especially with WarioWare and Wii Boxing).

Those who already have Wiis/Wiimotes can request anti-slip covers for free from Nintendo’s website, using an interface eerily similar to their wrist-strap replacement program of the past.

While I do not own a Wii, I recommend anyone who has a Wii take advantage of this program and claim their useful slip-cover.

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