Founder of GiveWell posts a fake question, answers it himself with a sockpuppet account, then gives everyone else shit for their answers. Basically, a selfish asshole running a charity.

UX Week 2008 keynote speaker Don Norman appeared last night on a 60 Minutes segment titled, “Get Me The Geeks!”, about the rise in tech support services as technology gets more complicated.

In other events news, we’ve extended our early registration deadline by one week. You can continue to save big through January 4.

Updates on our upcoming San Francisco events (not all reflected on their specific pages yet):

UX Intensive, February 19-22. Perhaps the most common feedback we’ve received from prior UX Intensive workshops is for the Interaction Design day to be even more advanced, and with more activities. Dan has heeded the call, and has revamped the entire day, structured around a series of 5 hands-on design exercises. Organizations represented by delegates attending UX Intensive include Google (22 attendees!), Stanford University, Humana, Wells Fargo, Oracle, St. David’s Healthcare, Target, Scripps Network, eBay, and Caterpillar.

MX San Francisco, April 21-22. The web page for the event needs an overhaul, but I can tell you that we’ve begun lining up some great speakers, including Peter Coughlan, the head of the transformation practice for IDEO; Chip Conley, CEO of boutique hotel chain Joie de Vivre Hospitality and author of the recently published book PEAK: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow.

UX Week 2008, August 12-15. Over time, UX Week evolved from a hands-on workshop to a conference of ideas. Delegates missed the skills-building, so this year we’ve decided to fuse the two — mornings will feature brief presentations on crucial experience design concepts, and afternoons will offer a range of longer presentations and workshops to provide concrete takeaways. We will have to limit numbers in these afternoon sessions to ensure a quality experience, so we’re going to be offering priority placement to those who sign up earliest. Sign ups will begin once all the afternoon sessions have been decided. Organizations attending UX Week include eBay, Cooper, McKinsey and Company, Wells Fargo, Continental Airlines, Walgreens Health Services, Humana, and the New York Public Library.

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Wow, what an eventful and interesting year 2007. I hope all of you enjoyed it as much as I did. All the best for 2008 and a wonderful New Year’s Eve! Wolfgang :)

I’m guessing that one of the more popular gifts this season is the iPod Touch. Christmas came early for me; I picked up my iTouch when I was in San Francisco in October. Thanks to Jina and a weak dollar, the price was right.

Ever since then, I’ve been making the most of it. The 16GB capacity is a bit limiting—my music collection is somewhat larger than that—but the combination of WiFi and a kickass web browser more than compensates. An iPod Shuffle is still probably the best choice for accompaniment on a brisk walk but the Touch is the perfect traveling companion on a train or plane.

I’ve been meaning to sit down and hack open the iPod but I just haven’t had the time… until now. As well as being the ideal time for wresting with operating system upgrades, this Christmas break in Arizona is the perfect opportunity for a bit of jailbreaking.

If you got a brand new iPod Touch for Christmas and you’d like to install third-party apps, here’s what you need to do.

Downgrading the firmware

Chances are you’ve updated your iPod’s software to version 1.1.2. You can find the version number by going to Preferences, then General, then About and looking under Version. If you’re running 1.1.1, you can skip ahead to the next step. If you’re running 1.1.2, you’ll need to downgrade to version 1.1.1 in order to jailbreak your iPod Touch. Once you’ve applied the jailbreak, you’ll be able to upgrade again.

You can follow all the steps required to downgrade. Be warned: this will remove any songs, movies and photos that you have on your iPod—you’ll need to sync again at the end of all this in order to get your stuff back on there.

In a nutshell:

1. Download the firmware.
2. Put your iPod into recovery mode.
3. Connect your iPod Touch to your Mac. When iTunes launches, hold down the option key and click Restore. Now select the file that you downloaded in step 1.
4. Wait for the firmware to install. Once it’s done, the iPod Touch will reboot.
5. Choose the option to set up a new iPod (the option to restore from backup won’t work). At this point, you might want to re-sync all the music and other data that was wiped in the firmware downgrade. Feel free to disconnect the iPod after this step.

Jailbreaking

Once you’re running version 1.1.1, hacking the iPod Touch is very simple. Make sure you’re online and then use Safari on the iPod to navigate to jailbreakme.com. Scroll down to the end of that page and click on “Install AppSnapp.” Safari will quit and you will see a progress indicator while your iPod gets cracked open (if you don’t see the progress indicator, go back into Safari and try that link again).

Once that’s done, you’ll have a new app on your iPod’s desktop called Installer. Now it’s time to prep for upgrading back to version 1.1.2.

Upgrading the firmware

Tap on that Installer app, then choose Install, scroll down to Tweaks (1.1.1) and select OktoPrep. Now click the “install” button in the top right corner and confirm your selection by clicking the big “install” button that pops up. Once that’s done, hit the home button and don’t get too freaked out when your iPod kicks you back to the locked screen.

Now connect you iPod to your Mac and fire up iTunes. You’ll probably be prompted to upgrade anyway but if not, click on the upgrade button. Once the upgrade is done, quit iTunes.

Download and unzip this Jailbreak app on your Mac. Open up the unzipped folder and double-click the jailbreak.jar file. Do what it says. Once your iPod is finished spazzing out with a couple of reboots, you’ll have a hacked device running the latest firmware—the best of both worlds.

Turbocharging the iPod Touch

The new Installer app on your iPod is your gateway to a world of third-party wonders. Here are my recommendations.

MobileScrobbler

This Last.fm app is wonderful. It’s like having a radio on your iPod but a radio that knows exactly what kind of music you like. While a song is playing, you can view an artist bio, read the song lyrics and even see upcoming tour dates. Get this: if you click on one of those concert dates, the event will be added to your Calendar app.

Colloquy

This is my IRC client of choice on the desktop so I was really happy to see that a version was available for the iPod Touch. It works a treat. Now I can pop into #microformats on freenode.net any time I want.

Books

Once you’ve got this eBook reader installed, you can download works in the public domain such as The Origin of Species and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes as well as the Creative Commons licensed Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig.

weDict

This is like the Books application but it’s specifically for StarDict dictionaries, of which there are many available to install. Install as many dictionaries as you like and you can then run simultaneous searches against them all. A single dictionary takes up less space than the average MP3.

Games

There’s a Tetris clone called Tetromino, a Chess app called Caissa, a fiendishly addictive game called Lights Off and of course, the ubiquitous Sudoku. The Sketches app isn’t strictly speaking a game but it sure is fun. It’s like etch-a-sketch—you can even shake the iPod to erase your drawings.

Installing iPhone apps

Ingenious as all these third-party apps are, you’re probably most eager to get your hands on those iPhone apps that for some reason known only to Steve Jobs, didn’t ship with the iPod Touch. Maps, Notes, Weather and Mail; these are all apps that can run perfectly well on your iPod.

By default, the Installer app doesn’t offer these applications. You can remedy that by clicking on the Sources list in Installer, then pressing the Edit button in the top right corner and then Add in the top left. Enter http://repo.us.to/ as a new source.

Now the Install list will show new categories including “iPhone 1.1.2 Apps for iTouch”. That’s where you’ll find the iPhone goodies, each one accompanied by a stern warning that you should of course already own an iPhone in order to install these apps (wink, wink). If you plan on installing Maps or Mail, be sure to install the corresponding Maps Prep and Mail Prep applications first.

Having the Maps application running on the iPod Touch is worth any jailbreaking hassle. It instantly makes the device more useful (and more fun).

Usually, accounts of iPod or iPhone hacking are accompanied by caveats absolving the author of any culpability so at this point I should probably say something about this all being at your own risk and yadda, yadda, yadda. But I’m not going to say that. Instead, I say if you’ve got an iPod Touch, jailbreak it now. It will unlock the latent power of that Turing machine in the palm of your hand and turn it from being an MP3 player into a true mobile device.

If something does go horribly wrong, the worst that’s going to happen is that you’ll need to restore your iPod Touch to its factory settings—something you can do in one click from iTunes.

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Tagged with jailbreak ipod hacking apple

It’s Friday! And the last Friday of the year. Happy New Year!

We just finished putting together this fun little web project the other night:
100 Facts About Literally Anyone

Basically, you put in someone’s name, and it returns 100 “facts” about that person.

Note: This project also makes experimental use of the “Google/MySpace Theory” where functionality takes precedence over looks (hence the horrible non-design).

Christmas is a time for giving, a time for over-indulgence, a time for lounging around and for me, a time for doing those somewhat time-consuming tasks that I’d otherwise never get around to doing… like upgrading my operating system.

I used the downtime here in Arizona to install Leopard on my Macbook. I knew from reading other people’s reports that it might take some time to get my local web server back up and running. Sure enough, I had to jump through some hoops.

I threw caution to the wind and chose the “upgrade” option. Normally I’d choose “Archive and Install” but it sounds like this caused some problems for Roger .

The upgrade went smoothly. Before too long, I had a brand spanking new OS that was similar to the old OS but ever so slightly uglier and slower.

My first big disappointment was discovering that my copy of Photoshop 7 didn’t work at all. Yes, I know that’s a really old version but I don’t do too much image editing on my laptop so it’s always been good enough. I guess I should have done some reading up on compatibility before installing Leopard. Fortunately, I was able to upgrade from Photoshop 7 to Photoshop CS3—I was worried that I might have had to buy a new copy.

But, as I said, the bulk of my time was spent getting my local LAMP constellation back up and running. I did most of my editing in BBEdit—if you install the BBEdit command line tools, you can use the word bbedit in Terminal to edit documents. If you use Textmate, mate is the command you want.

Leopard ships with Apache 2 which manages virtual hosts differently to the previous version. Instead of keeping all the virtual host information in /etc/httpd/httpd.conf (or /etc/httpd/users/jeremy.conf), the new version of Apache stores it in /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf. I fired up Terminal and typed:

bbedit /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

That file shows a VirtualHost example. After unlocking the file, I commented out the example and added my own info:

<VirtualHost *:80>
   ServerName adactio.dev
   DocumentRoot "/Users/jeremy/Sites/adactio/public_html"
</VirtualHost>

I then saved the file, which required an admin password.

The good news is that Leopard doesn’t mess with the hosts file (located at /private/etc/hosts). That’s where I had listed the same host names I had chosen in the previous file:

127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 adactio.dev

But for any of that to get applied, I needed to edit the httpd.conf file:

bbedit /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf

I uncommented this line:

# Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

While I was in there, I also removed the octothorp from the start of this line:

# LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

That gets PHP up and running. Leopard ships with PHP5 which is A Good Thing.

Going into Systems Preferences, then Sharing and then ticking the Web Sharing checkbox, I started up my web server and was able to successfully navigate to http://adactio.dev/. There I was greeted with an error message informing me that my local site wasn’t able to connect to MySQL.

Do not fear: MySQL is still there. But I needed to do two things:

1. Tell PHP where to look for the connection socket and
2. Get MySQL to start automatically on login.

For the first step, I needed a php.ini file to edit. I created this by copying the supplied php.ini.default file:

cd /private/etc
cp php.ini.default php.ini
bbedit php.ini

I found this line:

mysql.default_socket =

…and changed it to:

mysql.default_socket = /private/tmp/mysql.sock

I had previously installed MySQL by following these instructions but now the handy little preference pane for starting and stopping MySQL was no longer working. It was going to be a real PITA if I had to manually start up MySQL every time I restarted my computer so I looked for a way of getting it to start up automatically.

I found what I wanted on the TomatoCheese Blog. Here’s the important bit:

Remove the MySQL startup item (we’ll use the preferred launchd instead):

 sudo rm -R /Library/StartupItems/MYSQLCOM

Also, right-click and remove the MySQL preference pane in System Preferences because we’ll be using the preferred launchd instead.

Copy this MySQL launchd configuration file to /Library/LaunchDaemons, and change its owner to root:

sudo chown root /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.mysql.mysqld.plist

That did the trick for me. When I restarted my machine, MySQL started up automatically.

So after some command line cabalism and Google sleuthing, I had my local webdev environment back up and running on Leopard.

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Tagged with leopard mysql php osx apache apple