Gee’s Blog

I love my iPhone and MacBook Pro but I have to say that Apple’s quality control seems to be a bit lacking. Last night, my Macbook Pro’s screen suddenly went black and would not come back on.  I tried a hard reboot, resetting the PRAM, resetting the SMC, plugging in an external screen, and even just leaving it alone for 10 minutes before trying again LOL. It was already 1am at the time, so I just browsed Digg on my iPhone, went to sleep and brought it in this afternoon to see a  Genius at the Bar.

After some routine tests, he said it was a video board/chip error and that it would have to be replaced.  Lucky for me, this is a known/documented error and the repair would be free even though I am out of warranty.  They do have the part in stock and he assured me it would be ready for pickup in a couple days. Not too bad considering I have lots of other computers at home I can use.

So why am I questioning Apple’s QC?

This is actually already the second repair I have had to do on the MBP in just over a year.  The first time they had to replace the entire top panel because of a faulty touch pad.  On top of that, I have also gone through 4 different iPhones due to random issues where it just would not power on anymore (2 of the 1st gen and 2 of the 3G).  Each time they replaced it on the spot, with no questions asked (except for the obligatory, “did you drop it in water”?). None of my old PCs ever needed servicing and they are still running strong (Dell, Fujitsu, IBM, etc).  So, I was thinking… if not for their stellar customer service, I might be tempted to stop buying Apple stuff… but really I know I just can’t resist their shiny new products

Gee News, apple apple, iphone, macbook pro, pram, repair, smc

Today Twitter announced that they are receiving an additional $35 million in funding (even though they don’t really need it).

Erick Schonfeld from TechCrunch took the opportunity to ask IVP’s (Institutional Venture Partners) Todd Chaffee about why they decided to invest in Twitter at this stage. In response, he listed off a few reasons why Twitter is a winner and potential game-changer. These bullet points really caught my eye:

1. Open. That makes it easy for others to build on top of Twitter and it also makes it searchable.
2. Real time. It is a huge database of what is happening right now.
3. Ubiquitous. You can get to it from just about any device.
4. Scalable. (Don’t laugh)
5. Persistent. It allows for an archive of what is happening and what has happened, which is searchable (see No. 1).

Read more on that interview here…

It seems so simple yet not many companies can cross every one of these points off the list.  I’ll definitely keep this in mind while moving forward with some of my projects.  At least two of them are heading in this direction (I hope): Remobo and Rotzy

Gee News, Twitter funding, techcrunch, Twitter

Today Google announced that they have removed the “high cpu request” limit on their AppEngine platform.  This is great news as it used to limit your requests to a certain CPU usage quota… so any requests that used up too many cycles would eventually fail (if you did it too many times).

There is also one negative aspect to this.  The old quota really helps you to optimize your code to run fast and hence be more scalable.  Now that the quota is gone, it’ll be easier to be lazy about that

Here are the recent changes that were announced:

• No more “High CPU Requests”! App Engine Apps were once allowed no more than 2 CPU-intensive requests per minute. We’ve made some adjustments to the way we handle requests, and have eliminated this limitation altogether. To learn more about how this works and the implications for your app, see our documentation.
• Response deadline raised to 30 seconds. The amount of time an App Engine app can take to respond to an incoming request has been raised from 10 to 30 seconds! There are limits on the number of simultaneous active requests an application can process at any given moment–see our docs to learn more.
• Size limits on code files, static files, and requests/responses raised to 10MB! App Engine apps can now receive requests and send responses of up to 10MB in size, and users can upload 10MB code and static files as well. Note that API requests (e.g. memcache.set(), db.put()) are still limited to 1MB in size.

Gee News, Python appengine, google, Python

If you are looking into adding some map functionality to your app or web site, remember to also consider the Static Maps API for a non-interactive version of Google’s maps. This static API takes a list of parameters such as the map center, width & height, any markers or path data… and returns a static IMAGE instead of using javascript to render your map.

You won’t be able to interact with the map… but the main advantage here is speed.  The javascript needed to run the regular Google Maps API is quite heavy.  It doesn’t run well on mobile browsers and can take a few extra seconds to finish loading on regular desktop browsers as well.  So, if all you need is a nice looking map, the static API is a great choice.

For example, it seems to load a good 10x faster than the regular Google Maps API when loaded into a UIWebView controller on the iPhone.  Even on a wifi connection, the javascript API takes a good 5-10 seconds to show up, whereas the static image API loads almost instantly.  For mobile devices, speed currently trumps functionality in many cases such as this one.  The user won’t be able to pan and zoom, but they won’t complain if the map loads fast

We are using the static maps API in our Rotzy iPhone app and will just give users the option of clicking on it and bringing up the native Google Maps application if they really want to pan and zoom.

Here’s an example of how easy it is to generate a map by simply passing paramters to the API url:

# Note that this URL wraps at the '\' character.
# For clarity, we don't write the actual API key in use.
#
http://maps.google.com/staticmap?center=40.714728,-73.998672\
&zoom=14&size=512x512&maptype=mobile\
&markers=40.702147,-74.015794,blues%7C40.711614,-74.012318,\
greeng%7C40.718217,-73.998284,redc\
&key=MAPS_API_KEY&sensor=false

The code above will generate a map that looks like this:

Read more and get the full documentation here.

Gee API, Projects, Tips API, google maps, iphone, rotzy

I recently spent some time looking for the ideal platform for this blog… starting with free hosted solutions like wordpress.com and blogger.com. They both worked fine and got me up and running right away, but wordpress.com doesn’t allow any javascript or flash embeds and blogger just didn’t seem powerful enough.

I was trying to avoid hosting yet another custom WordPress installation on my own servers because maintaining them can be quite annoying sometimes… but in the end I figured it would give me the most flexibility. Luckily, I found a hack called Virtual Multiblog for WordPress. This simple download lets you install WordPress on your server just once, but gives you the ability to run many different blogs from it. So I was able to consolidate all my self-hosted blogs under one installation, making upgrades and maintenance MUCH easier down the line. Each blog can still have its own template, plugins, config file, etc.

If you need to host more than one WordPress blog on your own server, definitely take a look… it only takes a few minutes to set up but does require some knowledge on how to set up symbolic links etc. In the long run it should save you many hours of maintenance work

Gee News, Tips blog, blogger, multiblog, wordpress

Testing out a mobile blog from my iPhone using the wordpress app. Pretty cool!

Gee News iphone, mobile