ИконописПравославни иконииконипочистванехолови гарнитуриDue to an apparently apathetic Overstock customer service department, UPS had to mail us a letter by US mail to arrange for the delivery of our treadmill. When we originally placed the order we updated our contact information to fix an incorrect phone number but evidently the customer service reps that we spoke with didn’t update it or it didn’t get entered in the right places.
In a previous article, I speculated that Netflix might be trying to get out of paying the winning team due to a technicality. While my speculation turned out to be completely unfounded, the final 30 days of the contest were as exciting as the Kentucky Derby.
I’ve been following the Netflix Prize for years. This is the contest that gives all comers a chance to try and beat the formidable Cinematch algorithm that Netflix uses to give customers highly targeted recommendations. According to a recent email, Netflix may be preparing to announce the disqualification of the leading team “BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos” who submitted results that beats Cinematch by the contest’s goal of 10%.
Any application that needs to scale needs to designed to do so from the beginning. Or at least that’s what I used to think. Even when Amazon introduced EC2 and S3 there were still design requirements that you needed to consider. In fact, I actually started this project with S3 as the back-end. The idea was to store the URLs on S3 which had very quick response times and use quick scalable hosting (I hadn’t decided which hosting service at that time) with round-robin DNS to scale the front-end. It was a simple architecture but it would have worked. But…before I was able to go very far with the project, Google launched AppEngine. AppEngine took an entirely different approach to scalability. Use their SDK and platform and don’t even bother with scalability. So, I decided to switch over and give it a try.
With the new 2.0 firmware and the new App Store on iTunes you can get most of the functionality that you need without jailbreaking.
The following list are the apps that I use daily and can’t live without. As an added benefit, all of these are also free apps available from the iTunes Music Store.
I was checking out my twitters and noticed a post by Leo Laporte (Twit.tv) about a new social service called Plurk. My first reaction is that this is extremely cool! My second reaction is that i’m not sure it knows what it wants to be when it grows up.
Ok. It simply doesn’t get any easier than this. I’ve gone through all the backflips (you can read about them on my blog) and have downgraded, upgraded, sidegraded and jailbroken iTouches in just about every way possible on Windows. I’ve read about the ZiPhone jailbreak and have periodically checked the status of that but on previous visits, it looked like it was a work in progress for Windows anyway. So, I tried it tonight…and it worked so quickly I wasn’t even sure it was jailbroken, but sure enough, the Installer icon is on my home page ready for me to add any apps that I might want. So here’s what you need to do…
The following images are some of the cooler themes that are available for a 1.1.3 jailbroken iTouch running Summerboard.
Enjoy!
Apple has just sent out invitations to press and developers to an event hosting the introduction of the iPhone SDK. It’s about time!
To promote the two way discussion of various topics, i’ve installed the phpBB forum software on the site. You can see the new forums here.