see a puffin eat a fish

I have a jesus phone. I wasn’t planning on it or anything but an unstoppable convergence of events led me to the kool-aid. My N95 was getting pretty beat up (a couple of the keys were permanently recessed) and i’ve been itching to give iPhone development a shot. Then, when Anna and I were at the Apple store to buy a DVI to S Video/Composite adapter (Otis A/V media system!!) she said “Why don’t I get you an iPhone?” And I didn’t really know why she shouldn’t get me an iPhone, so now I have an iPhone. Just like that.

I’ve only had it for a couple of weeks but I think it’s made me a little stupid. Like forgetting how to find a parking spot on the streets of Brooklyn after parking in a garage for a few months. The iPhone is making me lose my edge. I now have a hard time working with interfaces designed by engineers. Which I guess is a compliment to Apple, except that the iPhone is going to make me slow. Maybe there is an app I can buy to screw up the interface?

Overall I dig it but I am not enamored with it. The browser is super dope as is visual voicemail and the location services but I have the usual litany of complaints (Flash, MMS, video, cut and paste, etc.) Also WTF is with running one app at a time? Such a bad call. That’s what I really miss about Symbian.

Since I am on my phone a lot more than my macbook, the convergence of my mobile and desktop interfaces has made me feel like my laptop is a giant phone. The iPhone is the closest thing i’ve used to the computers I use every day. Not bad.

The phone keeps on correcting ‘ooh’ to ‘pooh’. I don’t say pooh.

The past week i’ve been working with the Plodt team as part of the the Twitter Vote Report project. Lots of buzz words in the previous sentence. I’m pretty excited about it. On election day, people will be able to send in their voting experience via SMS, Twitter, iPhone, Android and voice. Good coverage. We in turn will localize and visualize the data showing polling place wait times, issues with voting machines as well as positive/negative experiences with the whole voting process.

Also this past Tuesday I was a guest critic in Family Feud Dennis’ Designing Around Place class at ITP. Lots of great projects and always nice to come back. Dovetailing with the Twitter Vote Report, check out one of the projects from that class, The New Vote with fancy custom mapping tiles.

Some cool stories. NYTimes build the Times Machine to convert and OCR all of their archives. This took 100 EC2 instances and about a half a day. The Washington post OCRed and indexed 17,000 pages of Hilary Clinton’s travel records in 11 hour for 142 bucks. Oh and S3 has 29 billion objects.

I’m west of Philadelphia, getting a feel for the current state of cloud computing. I’ve been using S3 for a while but after today I think I may try to move some systems over to EC2, see how it goes, especially now that Amazon has blocks (better coupling to persistent storage). AWS is also coming out out with Content Distribution Services to shorten the data hop.

Going to a talk in the afternoon entitled ‘be the cloud’. Not sure what to expect.

You know that the Fire Eagle badge can be used to embed your present location anywhere, (i’ll give a prize to anyone who sends me a photo of the badge on a Chumby), but did you know that the Fire Eagle badge can also tell you where you have been?! It’s true!!

Ok, ready? This is yet another undocumented feature. Grab your badge code and find the line that references fireeagle_badge.php. Here’s mine:

[snip]
src="http://www.txtst.com/fireeagle_badge/fireeagle_badge.php?k=jqs24bfn1806dxzc&timezone=Eastern+Standard+Time"
[snip]

Next, grab your key, that’s the part after k=. Mine is jqs24bfn1806dxzc. Then, all you have to do is append that key to the URL below, like so:

http://www.txtst.com/fireeagle_badge/fireeagle_badge_feed.php?k=jqs24bfn1806dxzc

That’s it really. This new link you’ve created will give you an RSS feed of the last 100 times your location was requested. The number of times your location is requested will completely depend on the number of times your embedded badge is accessed. The badge only goes out and ask for your location when it is loaded.

You can take this RSS feed and plot out your road trip, everyday travels, whatever. A little cool and a little creepy, just the way I like it.

Enjoy!

When you display your fire eagle badge, the embedded map tries to pick the best zoom level for your location’s bounding box. This depends on how granular your location is (we know you are on 123 Main st vs we know you are in the state of Nevada) but it also tries to show the best zoom level relative to the quality of map data. When this goes horribly wrong you get something like this:

lame++. Well now when I screw up you can pass a zoom level argument to the badge and hard code the zoom level you’d like. Find this line in your badge’s HTML:

src="http://www.txtst.com/fireeagle_badge/fireeagle_badge.php?k=5h3z8nmt97qbdj&timezone=Greenwich+Mean+Time"

and change it to this:

src="http://www.txtst.com/fireeagle_badge/fireeagle_badge.php?k=5h3z8nmt97qbdj&timezone=Greenwich+Mean+Time&zoom=4"

Mess around until you find a numeric zoom level that works well with your map.

Enjoy!