evatt.com

After much hassle, I finally have an iPhone 3G. It's my first "smart phone" and I love it.

My biggest complaint with the iPhone is it's battery life. After setting up the iPhone to sync both my gmail and exchange mail, I was lucky if the battery would last until I got home from work.

Turning off the Wi-Fi helped a lot. Over the weekend I turned off the auto syncing of mail and all of a sudden, the battery seemed to last forever.

Thus far, I have found two "killer apps" that are really making me love the iPhone.

The first is Shazam. Ever heard a song in the background and wonder, what song that is? Well, you don't have to wonder any more. Shazam has the ability to pick out songs in loud places and determine what is playing. It then provides links to iTunes and YouTube for the song.

The second apps is Pandora Radio. You tell Pandora a song you like, then it starts streaming songs similar to it over the iPhone. A few votes up or down on what it selects, then you have a stream full of songs you like. Now I have the ability to stream internet music in my car. Sweet! Best part, it doesn't seem to kill the battery (that fast).

I spent today at BarcampHouston3. I had a fantastic time. It was the best Barcamp yet.

I enjoyed the panels on Mobile technologies (David Herrold), Public Relations (Ed Schipul), Creative Thinking (Kelsey Ruger), and Using Flickr Professionally (TheFuzzball). Houston is full of talented, intelligent, and motivated people.

I can't wait until the next barcamp.

My photos of Barcamp Houston 3 are on flickr.

I have given my SEO talk twice in as many weeks to groups at chron.com focusing on basic SEO principles. Both talks were fun and I believe helped the users to understand how they can think in more of a SEO frame of mind while they produce content for the web.

Debian has moved Apache2::Reload to libapache2-reload-perl due to recent upstream changes to the release candidate of libapache2-mod-perl2 (2.0.4 rc1, "Works with Perl 5.10").

I discovered this as evatt.com went down for about ten minutes after a system upgrade because of the missing module.

Apache2::Reload reloads Perl modules that have been modified since the last time they have been used. It is invaluable when writing mod_perl code. For performance reasons, it is best practice to only use this module on development servers. I had forgotten I had configured this module into my Apache2 configuration. I should disable it on this server.

While visiting Destin this weekend, my father took us to the the Air Force Armament Museum near Eglin Air Force Base. He had interesting stories about most of the planes they have on display. The most interesting story to me included that when he was in the Air Force, he flew the actual B-52G they have on display outside the museum (shown on the right).

Microsoft has applied for a patent for what they call a “device
manners policy” (DMP). This wireless zone-enforced protocol would allow someone to remotely turn devices features (or devices) on or off based on specified policy.

Their logic, if you can't enforce good manners on people, enforce it on their electronics.

Besides the obvious application for shutting down phones at
theaters, such a policy could be used to enforce no audio or video
recording rules at concerts, etc., etc.

The better answer would be for the theaters to just kick people out
(without refunds) who use their phones during a movie. But they don’t
have the nerve to do this.

Some problems with this type of technology are:

o) What type of range does it have? 20 feet outside the theater? 50
feet outside the theater? Will it interfere with a neighboring
business?

o) What happens if my battery dies after been disabled? Are there
any routes that would prevent a disabled phone from being reenabled?

o) Is this only for incoming calls? If someone is having a heart
attack (happens), will we have find a pay phone (very hard to find) or
run 50 feet outside the theater to call for help?

o) Once the protocol is established, what is to prevent a malicious person from jamming devices where they are allowed?

I hate when society punishes responsible people for the sake of catching all the irresponsible people in one net.

Teenage hackers are responsible for the Comcast DNS issues I fought last week. Dark Reading claims Comcast was under attack for about 5 hours. I believe it was longer. I can feel a little less angst towards Comcast now that I know they where not directly responsible for the DNS issues.

During our brief visit to New Orleans, Adine and I stumbled upon a wedding at the Plaza de Armas while exploring the French Quarters. Adine was intrigued by the outdoor wedding and sneaked behind the action to get one of the best views in the house.

Other fun activities in New Orleans included eating at the Cajun Cabin (good eats! - but warning - they include the tip for even parties of 2), winning at Harrah's, and tons of window shopping.

Comcast's DNS servers for home broadband users are now pointing traffic back to Comcast. Adine's father called me for help because his internet was down. His AOL account would not login, but gave no reason as to why.

I started firefox to determine if the problem was local to his machine or if he could hit his router. With Firefox, every page I attempted to visit returned a 403 permission denied error?!?

What???

After checking his firewall, I tried MSIE. With MSIE, all URL's served some Comcast page requiring him to install software on his machine and create a Comcast email account.

What does this software do? How many instabilities will it add to his machine? Why didn't they warn him of the change? His internet had been working for years.

After playing with nslookup, I discovered all DNS searches returned the same Comcast IP address (sorry, I did not write down the address). A friend suggested I override his DNS configuration to use Open DNS. After this change, everything started working again.

What is Comcast up to? Why did they make their capture page MSIE only?

Luckily, their system is not as intrusive as most hotels and we where able to get around it by change DNS servers. But how long until they stop this too?