Google sync on Windows Phone 7.5 works great, with one notable exception: your shared calendars aren’t automatically recognized.
Fortunately this problem is solvable on Google’s end, as detailed in this post. Basically, you tell Google to sync specific shared calendars with your WP7 device, and you’ll be all set. Worked for me.
The bitter family feud that has divided the children of Martin Luther King Jr. isn’t much different than other fights between brothers and sisters — except that this one has spilled into the courts and publicly tarnished the legacy of an American icon of peace and harmony.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
So that dream came true, just not the way he expected.
The President recently asked us to come up with a better system for enforcing copyright online.
Here’s my proposal:
Exempt linking to, copying, and redistributing digital information, while leaving all other copyright protections in place.
This radical but progressive move acknowledges the fact that digital copying and redistribution is fundamental to the way networked computers operate. It protects all manner of fair use sharing and derivative works as long as they happen online. And it frees up resources for enforcement of copyright on physical media and the sale of licenses, which is where media companies make their money.
In short, everybody wins. And yes, people will still buy books, movies, and music when copying them is free. We are willing to pay for convenience and authenticity, and of course we want to own nicely packaged copies of the works that we treasure.
A file that big?
It might be very useful!
But now it is gone.
In 1998, Salon Magazine ran a challenge to readers to convert Window’s style error messages into haiku. The above, by David J. Liszewski, is a favorite. But the winner in my opinion, was this gem by Nick Sweeney:
wind catches lily
scatt’ring petals to the wind:
segmentation fault
Facebook-er Kent Beck’s Software Design Glossary includes an entry on Succession, “the art of taking a single conceptual change, breaking it into safe steps, and then finding an order for those steps that optimizes safety, feedback, and efficiency.”
As an example, he gives us (for free!) this pattern for migrating from one datastore to another:
- Convert data fetching and mutating to a DataType, an abstraction that hides where the data is stored.
- Modify the DataType to begin writing the data to the new store as well as the old store.
- Bulk migrate existing data.
- Modify the DataType to read from both stores, checking that the same data is fetched and logging any differences.
- When the results match closely enough, return data from the new store and eliminate the old store.
Beats shutting everything down for hours while you wait for the data to get copied over the wire.
Oauth, brilliantly explained, on a napkin. (via Matthew Story)
The authors of the (otherwise excellent) mSecure password database for iOS and OS X do not let you chose where to save the password database. This makes it difficult to use Dropbox or a USB key to share the same database between, say, a home and a work computer.
Yes, you can manually sync via and iPhone or via the new “Dropbox sync” feature in v3.0. But manual syncing falls down the first time you get home and realize that you forgot to sync at work, and now you don’t have the password you really need. F**k that.
In the case of Dropbox sync, there is a workaround: move the mSecure folder from “~/Library/Application Support” into your Dropbox, then create a symlink to the moved folder in Application Support. Create the same symlink on your other computers.
You can’t just symlink the password db file, as mSecure will overwrite the symlink with an actual file.
Here’s how you do it, in Terminal, on the first computer:
cd ~/Library/Application\ Support
mv mSecure ~/Desktop/Dropbox/
ln -s ~/Desktop/Dropbox/mSecure ./On the second through nth computers, just create the symlink after deleting the existing mSecure folder:
cd ~/Library/Application\ Support
mv mSecure ~/.Trash/
ln -s ~/Desktop/Dropbox/mSecure ./You will still need to sync your iOS devices manually, but at least you’ll have an always-synced desktop version to use when you do that.
For users who want to put their mSecure db on a USB key or in a TrueCrypt archive: well, you’re out of luck. You could use the symlink trick, but I suspect that if you launch mSecure and the symlink is broken (because you don’t have the USB key in place) it will happily create a new folder with a blank db. Haven’t tested it, feel free to comment.
Update: Ben Morin has improved on the Snow Leopard method to get Java 1.5 working on OS X Lion. Great news!
Why would anyone want to go through all that just to get Java 1.5? There are plenty of applications out there (my beloved Zend Studio 5.5 is one of them) that are stuck at 1.5 because vendors have either disappeared or have moved on in incompatible directions.
One of these days I’m going to write an essay about the long-tail downside of the software lifecycle, which is a secret productivity killer. Open source your old applications and old builds — don’t just abandon them. I’d much rather fix the display bugs in Zend Studio than keep having to use Java 1.5 from Leopard.
According to this page, the major difference between the Mobile Core i5 and i7 processors shipping in the latest generation of Macbook Air is that the i7 line has hyperthreading enabled, which doubles the apparent number of cores.
Since OS X Lion is an aggressively multithreaded and multiprocess OS, that will probably make a big difference. Benchmarks anyone?
IEEE Spectrum just published a special report on “The Social Web”, which does a great job of summing up where we are and what the landscape looks like.
Some of it is the same old (and tired) Google vs Facebook PR schmaltz, but they are the major players circa 2011, at least in population and business valuation.
The pieces I was really drawn toward are the ones that survey the state of social privacy (as in, is it an oxymoron?) and the excellent article about Facebook’s lack of social context. Do your family and work colleagues see you the same way your friends do? Should they?
Re:Part of a money conflict within the King family (Score:5, Insightful)