This is the page I got as a result of typing in my ZIP code to get the weather report yesterday. It measures 1266 pixels wide and 678 pixels tall. That’s a total of 858,348 pixels with which they could have told me the weather. That, was  – I thought, a simple request. And apparently it isn’t. I don’t run Adblock, but apparently I should. I usually go to wunderground.com or weather.com, both of which are far more tolerable, but I thought I should make mention of this anyway.

There comes a point when a company, in this case – Accuweather, needs to ask themselves: what the fuck are you doing? Do you have that little respect for the people who use your site?

Today, I received a nondescript brown parcel from the UPS guy. Little did I know that it was in fact my Secret Santa gift. Please join me in the unboxing, don’t skip to the end – spoilers stink.

Sure thing, internet stranger.

It’s a book. Not another copy of “Freakonomics”, please.

This poorly written dialogue looks familiar. I’m glad somebody finally found a good use for a printed copy of Twilight.

Sh**, it’s the third Twilight book. Dick move, sir.

Well, you put the effort into sending me the book. Might as well read it. Wow, this Edward fellow sounds like a dreamboat.

Turning the page to page 54… Wait, what?

Page 179.

Page 293.

That just happened.

I believe in the magic illusion business, they call this misdirection. Try as you all might, but I don’t believe there will be a Secret Santa gift for this year that will be able to top this. It has everything. Mystery, suspense, brooding vampires, Star Trek, Adam Sandler, and a battle-scared iPhone. Dennis (coderascal), that was awesome. Higher-resolution images are available by clicking each photo or by going directly to the Flickr set.

Apologies in advance to my Secret Santa recipient. It doesn’t have one tenth of one percent the creativity that this did. And now it’s time to go watch Funny People.

Example: Andy Baio was totally just ‘boinged, but it’s totally fine because BB is hip and so-not-corporate.

So – who wants a steampunk waffle-iron?

Through resources on the Drupal developer site and code posted by user “foxtrotcharlie”, I’ve created a module you can place in /modules that works with Drupal 5 and can be modified to work with Drupal 4 and 6.

To start out, you’ll need to gain access to phpmyadmin or your tool of choice to alter your site’s SQL database. Edit the string length of “title” to 255 characters in DB table “node” and “node_revision” or any value you wish, but might as well go for the biggest you can.

Once you do this, add the module I supply at the bottom of this post which is all set to go for Drupal 5 installations and should survive new updates of Drupal.

Download: Drupal Maxlength Module

While OS X 10.4 and 10.5 have built-in support for ExpressCard and USB 3G networking devices, it does not give you all the features of the card nor the ability to complete the initial service activation. Earlier this year, Sprint began to offer companion software and drivers for their EV-DO equipment for OS X users called “Sprint SmartView”. The software gives you access to more detail about your usage, what network you’re connected to, and GPS services (which we’ll get into later). With this software, you can now complete data card firmware updates and activate service obviating the use of virtualization of Windows or borrowing a friend’s computer for that. My only real issue with it is that doesn’t act like a Mac application, as you can tell immediately when it installing a desktop shortcut (not a dock shortcut, a desktop shortcut) and by the various interface inconsistencies. Otherwise, it’s a pretty good step by Sprint – you can download the SmartView software here – Sprint Downloads.

However, GPS is the main point of this post. With the new connection manager comes the ability to use the A-GPS functionality of all Sprint EV-DO cards to locate yourself. To use the basic location function, launch the SmartView software and click on the “GPS” drop-down and it will acquire a signal and locate you. You can click the shortcuts there to find yourself on Google Maps and each icon will take you to a different search such as restaurants and Sprint locations near you. Neato. But the most useful function of this would be to get directions and track yourself. Since the software will create a NMEA port on your device that will pipe the location data into another program that can use it. For this tutorial, we’ll use Google Earth since everyone loves Google Earth. The only sticking point here is that to use GPS, you’ll have to subscribe to “Google Earth Plus” which is $20 a year – $1.67 a month, don’t be cheap, pay for it.

To enable NMEA output, click the icon that resembles a ‘play button’. Now, launch Google Earth Plus and wait for it to load completely and log-in. Now go to the “Tools” menu and  and select “GPS”. This will bring up a settings window like the one pictured on the right. Click on the “Realtime” tab and select “NMEA”. From here, you will want to check the “Automatically follow the path” radio box and choose how often you want to poll the card for new location coordinates (six to ten seconds works well). Click “Start” and you’ll see Google Earth pan to your current location and follow you as you move in your car and of course this works on the go as your EV-DO service is more than sufficient to pull down the maps/satellite imagery on the fly.

Google Earth Plus with Realtime GPS

Now you’re ready to use this to get directions and find businesses around you based on your current location anywhere you go with your Mac laptop. Don’t forget that you can also track a trip by saving your path in the “Places” menu. The GPS function does not eat much of your battery, however, Google Earth can be CPU intensive at times, so it might be advantageous to bring a charger or second battery along with you.

Have questions? Leave them in the comments and I’ll try update the post.

About five weeks ago, my Xbox 360 stopped retrieving an IP address from my router. I waited until the weekend to start troubleshooting it. I powercycled all the devices involved (Xbox, cable modem, AirPort Extreme) and tried again. Nothing. I then proceeded to to reset the firmware of the router, tried plugging the Xbox 360 directly into the modem, hard reset the modem, cloned the MAC address of a different device onto the 360, manually assigned the 360 an IP address rather than using DHCP, and many more. Nothing worked. So, I reluctantly called Microsoft Xbox support on Sunday (20 July) to see what could be done about this. I was walked through extensive troubleshooting steps provided to me by the Xbox Live representative, and even though I had already been through all of them, I ran through them once more. After an hour and a half on that call, being placed on hold repeatedly and embarking on remedies that made no sense, I was told to call back after I had contacted my ISP to check with them why the issue was occurring. Rather than do this, I elected to borrow another Xbox 360 console from a friend and try that. After plugging it into my normal network configuration and tossing my hard drive onto it, everything connected just fine which shows there is absolutely nothing wrong with my home network or internet connection.

I called back about an hour after the previous support call had ended. After more holding and futile support remedies, I was told the issue would need to be escalated to Microsoft for “investigation” since they were hung up on the fact that I was using an Apple AirPort Extreme (oh noes, an Apple product!). They informed me that it would take about seven business days to completely this, and while this seemed like an extraordinarily long time for such a simple issue, I said I’d wait for a call.

Two weeks had passed without a call, so I called Xbox customer support a third time on the 3rd of August. The support representative looked into my case, placed me on hold, and came back after ten minutes to tell me that a supervisor would call me in three to five business days after they had looked at the case because it was still “pending” with Microsoft. I had other things to do that day, so rather than argue it, I said fine and waited. Another week passes without a call. A week after (10th of August), I phone once more to check on what the status was and again, I was told that I would receive yet another fictitious phone call within two to three business days. Yet another week passes without any action.

Frustrated and frankly, quite angry, I called customer support once more last Sunday. I was calm and polite throughout but became increasingly unnerved at the fact that I was receiving the same story yet again. I asked vehemently why I should expect a different outcome with the “wait for a call” routine than what I had seen over the past month, and I was simply told that it would be taken care of in two days by a manager. I ended the call and stewed for a while – thankfully I have the loaner Xbox from a friend so I could take out the frustration with some Call of Duty 4.

Welp, it’s Thursday now, four days after the last call and I have (surprise, surprise) have not received a callback. I’ll be calling back tomorrow and will not accept a callback or brush-off as an acceptable solution. I’m floored that such a simple issue can be taking this long and that the investigation of said issue is being treated as though it involves a completely different company. I’ll post again with the outcome, which will hopefully, be more positive than what I’ve experienced thus far. Astonishingly, this has not soured my opinion of the Xbox brand and I’d still recommend it to anyone as I truly think it is the best gaming experience. I just hope my case is an anomaly amongst tens of thousands they work through.

In order to watch a few events of the 2008 Olympics that I wanted to see from nbcolympics.com, I was forced to install Microsoft Silverlight on OS X. I had resisted for quite a while, but I guess the Beijing Olympics are the huge foot in the door that Microsoft has been looking for. After installing, I was pleased to see that there is a whole freaking tab just for digital rights management. I’m glad that the competitor to Adobe Flash makes it clear out of the gate what it’s about – keeping the content provided in control and a user experience second. Kudos.

They can try to transition to the domain they most likely paid a metric buttload for, but the social bookmarking service del.icio.us is going to continue be named as such in my bookmarks. Stubborn indignation brings change, right?

Two questions are raised with this issue – whether it is legal to use an open wireless network without explicit permission of the owner, and whether it is morally ethical to use an open network. The former is simple and difficult to answer depending on how you look at it. The development cycles of technology have far outpaced the legislative cycle – this coupled with the ineptitude of elected officials with respect to the issue makes for an unclear legal standing for many activities such as this and file sharing. It’s not an illegal practice for one primary reason: there is no circumvention of a protection scheme or barrier to entry. When one looks for a network to connect to, an attempt to connect to an open access point is met with an acceptance of the request for an IP address by the router’s DHCP server. In cases where encryption technologies are present and a pre-shared key are required to connect, attempts to circumvent this security scheme are most definitely illegal as the operator of the network has done their due diligence to protect their internet service from theft. In this scenario, theft of service is occurring, in the former, not so much.

Is it ethical? Absolutely not. This is where I differ from most technology enthusiasts (read: nerdoids) insofar as I believe accessing an open home network is wrong because you are in some capacity depriving the operator of the bandwidth they pay for. The common analogy is that you’d think of a WiFi access point as a lamp in the outside someone’s home. Is it wrong to sit under the lamp to help you read? Absolutely not. But it’s a completely flawed idea because it failed to take into account usage patterns. Using an open network is consuming a portion of the avaialble bandwidth, for the analogy to work, you’d have to say the lamp grows dimmer as another user sits under it. Remember, most of the open APs you come across in a residential area are open out of ignorance to the security risks and/or because the user just doesn’t have the knowledge to enable an encryption scheme. The other argument is that anyone is entitled to use the network because the network is being trasmitted through their walls into their property or onto public property. Again, this doesn’t put the nature of the issue into perspective – and to get technical about it, the government owns and licenses the radio airwaves.

Simply put, using an open network is not illegal. It is not theft of service since a request for access is met with acceptance rather than rejection. However, it is unethical. Have I done it? Rarely, but yes. Does that make me a hypocrite? Probably, but it’s food for thought anyway.

Rather than driving around looking for open APs or leeching off a neighbors connection, just subscribe to mobile broadband. It’s really not that expensive…