Due to my past entries in the contest itself, i’m on the mailing list to receive notices and announcements for participants.  As of about 30 minutes ago, I received a general compliance email announcing that some participants have failed to comply with the Netflix Prize rules by creating multiple teams with an identical set of members.  According to the Netflix rules, any participants and all teams to which they belong may be suspended from participation in the contest and may be ineligible for the coveted one million dollar prize.

Sounds fair right?  So here is the rub.   On June 26, 2009 Team “BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos” reached the 10% improvement over the Cinematch algorithm required to claim the million dollar prize.    According to the rules, once this goal is reached, all teams have 30 days to submit their final results to be considered for the prize.  The clock is ticking and the last day of the contest is July 26, 2009.   But…

BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos is an amalgam of multiple teams that have collaborated to win the prize.  The current leaderboard for the list looks like someone was playing musical chairs with the team names including things like “Pragmatic Theory”, “BellKor in BigChaos”, “BigChaos”, “BellKor” and so on.

The leading team openly admits that they have collaborated to create a winning algorithm and it may well be that the prestige of beating Cinematch will be sufficient to satisfy their competitive spirits but it sure seems like Netflix is already prepping the world for the announcement that the winning team may be disqualified.

I realize the rules were published years ago and have been very clearly stated but I have to admit, this sure feels like bad sportsmanship to me in a game that Netflix created and could benefit from since, also according to the rules, they own the submissions and the algorithms used to generate them.

The following text describes how to restore a non-responsive iTouch after a failed jailbreak attempt.

Symptoms of diseased iTouch:

• History of failed attempts at jailbreaking
• Non-responsive to touch
• Displays pages of scrolling white text before hanging
• Only displays black screen
• Permanently displays restore icon

If your iTouch is presenting with any of the preceding symptoms or other similar signs, proceed with the following proceeds until the patient responds to treatment.

Step 1 – Artificial Rescuscitation: try resetting iTouch by holding down both Home and Wake buttons for 10-20 seconds until iTouch restarts.  If iTouch doesn’t reboot and display the home screen, move on to step 2 – defibrillation.

Step 2 – Defibrillation: plug iTouch into the USB while holding the home button down…it should go into restore mode.  Once it goes into restore mode (illustrated by a screen that shows the iTunes icon and a USB cable) you should get a restore prompt from iTunes.  If you do not get a restore prompt from iTunes then you may have a dysfunctional iTunes installation and should proceed to step 3.

Step 3 – Dialysis: If you are unable to get a reaction from iTunes when you connect you iTouch (even after defib), then your best bet is to reinstall iTunes to fix any issues that you may have with your USB drivers and the iTunes services.  Do this with your iTouch disconnected and do not reconnect your iTouch until after the iTunes installation is complete.  When the iTunes installation is complete, reconnect the iTouch and you should be rewarded with a restore prompt or at least iTunes will recognize your iTouch and give you the main device screen where you can select the “Restore” button.  If you do not see either of these then your computer has other issues and you need a different kind of doctor.  We don’t do Windows.

Step 4 – Group Therapy: Regardless of which steps were necessary to restore your iTouch, you should probably know in advance that smoking cigarettes will give you cancer and jailbreaking your iTouch may fail.  If either one of these scenarios scare you then you should probably not do it.  Also, since as soon as you have finished restoring your iTouch, you will probably pick up another cigarette and proceed to jailbreak your iTouch again (we never learn…do we   the try the following tips to avoid another failed jailbreak attempt:

• Turn off autolock in settings
• Make sure you have a fully charged battery
• Don’t be impatient and start killing programs and disconnecting the iTouch until it is done
• Be sure you have a reliable wireless network…this means you should probably not use the neighbors unprotected linksys network

DISCLAIMER: Most of article was written with the best of intentions and in a light-hearted manner. The rest of it are serious and meant to advise and assist those of you who want to venture into the unknown world of jailbreaking.  You pick which parts are which.

It feels like a twitter clone but is missing some of the key elements such as the SMS linkage.  It has video, and image sharing which feels more like a full grown social network.

They have a feedback system built-in (you get karma for inviting friends and other actions) but all your karma seems to driven by helping plurk grow…hmm?!  Isn’t karma supposed to be good deeds in general?   Also, you get a goofy plurk character that represents your karmic self at different levels of plurkiness.  The one-eyed plurker pictured above is my first karmic representation…i’m going out to do some good deeds right now!

It doesn’t actually seem to compete with any of the current services (at least not on feature set)…but, it’s so cool i’m going to keep plurking to see where the rabbit hole goes!

Click here for my personal invite to join plurk!

The one simple step is running the ZiPhone software.  Make sure your iTouch is restored to a non-jailbroken state with the latest version of the firmware (1.1.4).  Also, make sure your iTunes software is up to date.  Connect your iTouch and make sure iTunes recognizes it.  If it does not, then reinstall iTunes and do whatever else you have to do to make sure your iTouch is visible to your computer.  Close iTunes but leave your iTouch connected to your computer.  Now, go to http://www.ziphone.org/ and click on the “Click here to download Ziphone” link.   Then download the Windows version of the ZiPhone software.  This is a phone named ZiPhoneWin-3.0.exe.   Run this file and you will get a directory full of files similar to the following.

Now double-click on the file named “JAILBREAK IPHONE IPOD.bat”.  You will see a console window on your computer and your iTouch.

After a moment, your iTouch will reboot and you will see the ZiPhone application appear on your computer screen.  Click on the appropriate button to finish the jailbreak.

The whole process takes about a minute.  This is the cleanest jailbreak so far.  So…my advice to you is to forget everything i’ve said in the past and use the ZiPhone method.  Now…i’ve got to go get my daughter’s iTouch to jailbreak that again…1.1.4 here we come!!!

Yes. I know 1.1.4 is available. I’m working on it…but i’ve spent quite a bit of time experimenting with the different techniques for a smooth 1.1.3 jailbreak on Windows and this seems to be the best by far. This article explains the easiest step i’ve found yet for jailbreaking your 1.1.3 iTouch.

This article is now obsolete.  If you want to jailbreak your iTouch on WIndows, then you should click on the following article for the most up-to-date method of jailbreaking.

http://abwaters.com/2008/04/15/jailbreaking-114-itouch-on-windows-in-1-simple-step/

To start, you will need to have a jailbroken 1.1.1 (or 1.1.2) iTouch. If you’ve been to this site before, you know that you can follow the steps in this article to downgrade or jailbreak an iTouch running 1.1.3 or 1.1.4 (yes…i’ve tried it and it works to downgrade from 1.1.4 as well).

Ok. Now for the good stuff! If you followed the steps of the previous article, you will have a 1.1.1 jailbroken iTouch and you know that there isn’t much you can do with it…all the good stuff is available for 1.1.3 or higher.

First, go to the Installer and install System->BSD Subsystem. Once that is installed you should select the Update button in the Installer to make sure everything is updated.

Before we go to the next step, make sure you know how to restart your iTouch. To do this you select and hold the “Sleep” button until you get the “Slide to Power Off” message. By the way, the manual for the iTouch is located here if you need a refresher on the more esoteric features of your iTouch. And…more importantly, go to settings and make sure you turn off the Auto-Lock feature by setting it to Never.

Now run the Installer and select Sources and press the Edit button then press the Add button. You will be prompted for a URL for another repository source. Enter http://ijailbreak.com/repo.plist and select OK. If you’ve done this correctly, you will see a new category called iJailBreakMobile in the Install screen of the Installer. If you do not see this category, then you very likely have mistyped the URL above. Go back to sources and try not to fumble finger it this time.

The next step does all the work and takes quite a bit of time. Go to the iJailBreakMobile category and select “iJailBreakMobile 1.1.1″ and press the Install button. Now go back to your home screen on your iTouch and you will see a new icon called iJailBreak. Press this and then put your iTouch somewhere safe and let it run. Since the script will download the 1.1.3 firmware and install it, this takes some time so your iTouch should be well charged or plugged in to a USB port while it is running the upgrade. If you don’t see a script running after the above step is complete then you missed a step somewhere or you didn’t start with a clean jailbroken 1.1.1 iTouch. Start over and try again.

Once the upgrade is done, you will be on 1.1.3 but you have some more steps to do. Go back to the Installer and select the iJailBreakMobile category again and install “iPod Touch Software Upgrade”. This installs a new icon called iJailbreak that looks just like the upgrade icon we just ran. Run this and it will install the cool new apps and the ability to rearrange your device home screen by pressing and holding an icon until it starts wiggling. Reboot for good measure here…

Now to cleanup after yourself. Go back to the Installer, back to iJailBreakMobile and install the “Remove 1.1.3 Upgrade Data. After this is done, you are now fully upgraded to 1.1.3 and you can install the latest version of Summerboard and all the cool Summerboard themes. I’ll post some screenshots to Flickr later today.

This feature alone was worth the effort to do the upgrade!

Amazon.com has the worlds biggest retail site. That takes quite a bit of infrastructure to run a site like that…right? But an infrastructure like that is also a valuable commodity if you can monetize it…Amazon seems to be trying to do just that. They want to provide the infrastructure that will power the next wave of web sites. The amazing part of the Amazon Web Services offering is that there are no setup charges or other up-front costs required to setup a world-class scalable web application. If you can imagine it, you can build it…on the Amazon framework.

So here is what they are actually offering and what it means.

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3)

This is the gem of Amazon’s web service offerings.  Unlimited (theoretically) storage on tap.  While there were some hickups in the beginning and there are some limitations (5GB maximum object size), S3 provides scalable, highly available, secure persistent storage.  I looked at this when it was first offered and while it was a beautiful service, it was hard to roll into certain types of products since control over the “secret” key needed to store objects was critical to security.  It required certain back-flips to use a client installed package that could store objects to a central storage facility and pushing the data through a 3rd party web-host effectively limited the benefits of the famous S3 scalability.

Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) 

This is so cool it’s hard to fully describe.  Think virtualization on steroids.  Unlimited computing power on tap.  No setup fee and a fee of 10 cents per processor hour and you’ve got something very interesting.  It is a very technical service requiring quite a bit of knowledge and ability to setup but this just creates another market for technical shops to be able to offer support services for EC2 and the other services.

Amazon’s Simple DB (no abbreviation here)

Ok.  By this time, if you have the next killer application in mind and all you need is some VC money to make it happen, you are starting to get excited.  You are starting to see a strategy that will allow you to boot-strap your business and your application without shelling out the big bucks for the rack servers and the data center.  Amazon’s SimpleDB…one of the key elements that can pull it all together is exactly what it’s name says it is.  A simple database.  But…a simple database that scales to extremely large numbers of connections, large numbers of tables and massive record counts.  If you don’t understand what that means for your application just think of it like this.  You could build…well, the next Amazon.com on this platform.

Let’s see…store the content on S3, put the data in SimpleDB and analyze the data for recommendations and other batch jobs using EC2.  Wait a minute…this is really getting good.

Now, remember that I mentioned there was a problem with S3 with the secret key?

The problem was partly a security problem and partly a billing problem.  S3 is billed on transfer and storage space.  Not very much, but as you pack on the gigabytes, the pennies add up.  So you either have to over bill to give you some room for customers who use more resources and make your profit on the backs of the customers who don’t abuse the service, or you have to come up with some way of tracking usage.  This is a tough thing to do and still retain scalability.   Also, there is still the security issue.  You have to really work to protect the secret key used to store your data.   But…Amazon, either realized this and rushed filled the gap or always understood this and just didn’t release the solution until recently.

 Amazon’s DevPay (ok..so no catchy abbreviations but who cares…I don’t)

DevPay is a commerce layer on top of S3 and EC2.  Takes care of the security problem.  Takes care of the billing problem.  The only minor drawback is that the customer is a shared customer with Amazon even though you provide the application.  For most applications this won’t be a problem and if you built your app on S3, EC2 and SimpleDB anyway, well…you are already in bed with Amazon so this is not a tough pill to swallow.

The Other Stuff

Ok…there are other web services as well.  There is SQS (Simple Queue Service), the Mechanical Turk (this one is really strange…you pay pennies for human power to perform repeatable, tedious tasks), the Flexible Payment Service (another commerce model that allows you to charge for services and goods using Amazon’s commerce backend) and of course, Amazon’s affiliate web services.

The thing about all this is that its not obvious.  These web services have been rolled out quietly and the average person has no clue what this actually means.  But there are quite a few businesses that are not only successfully using these services to launch their  businesses, they are doing it with much larger profit margins and significantly less capital drain as a result.

They keep up like this and one day, there will be a handful of major players (especially if Microsoft succeeds with their hostile takeover of Yahoo) and a large number of medium and small web application/service providers with a large number of them using Amazon’s platform.

Ok…now for my psychic act.

If Amazon does this well and proves the market (I have to admit, they seem to be doing it) , then Google will wake up and do the same thing and become the second major virtual application platform.  Microsoft will realize that they missed the boat and quickly build their own boat on a .NET based platform and jump in.

The result with be good for all of us.  New more powerful, more scalable applications running on AmazonSpace, GoogleSpace or .NETSpace.

What do you guys think?

But it seems obvious to me that there is some risk in doing this. In fact, I made a point in my post of how nervous I was in the beginning. The bottom line is that you assume the risk when you do something like this…but honestly, the risk is not that high. The iTunes sync interface allows you to “Update” and “Restore” your iTouch (iPod, iPhone…whatever). What is not obvious is that you can also backup your iTouch. So here you go.

On Windows, you can go to the device sync screen below:

On this screen, the Restore button is what you would use to restore your device back to the most recent firmware upgrade. At worst case, this will erase all the music you have sync’ed and remove any other settings you may have changed and set your device back to a default configuration. This is not all that bad as an option for those of you who didn’t do a backup before you tried breaking your iTouch out of jail!

But…if you want to save yourself even the time involved in recreating settings and resynching your music, then try Ctl-Clicking on the restore button. You will get a dialog like the following that gives you the option to do a backup of your device and your settings before you restore the firmware.

So backup up your device! Try jail-breaking it…turn it into a brick a couple of times, restore it. Take a deep breath because were sure just a few minutes ago that you would never see your iTouch again. Then…start the entire process over again! And just remember…i’m not making you do this! But…good luck anyway!

This article is now obsolete.  If you want to jailbreak your iTouch on WIndows, then you should click on the following article for the most up-to-date method of jailbreaking.

http://abwaters.com/2008/04/15/jailbreaking-114-itouch-on-windows-in-1-simple-step/

The thing that caused me to dive into this was an application called PocketGuitar. The GUI on PocketGuitar is extremely simple. It is simply a grid that you quickly understand corresponds to the strings and frets on a virtual guitar but the sounds created by this application are amazing and very compelling. My daughter actually pressured me into installing this application for her on her iTouch.

First, my worries about permanently destroying the device were unfounded. The iTouch can be restored fairly easily just using the normal “Restore” feature built into the iTunes software. So after trying and retrying and googling and re-googling, I realized that before I could jailbreak the device I had to restore it back to an earlier version of the firmware. In fact, it turns out that the real work in jailbreaking the device was getting from my current 1.1.3 firmware back to the 1.1.1 firmware.

1) The first thing you need to do is obtain a copy of the 150mb firmware restore file which you can download here. For me the tough part of this was that different sites give you different instructions on how to restore this. A large number of the sites tell you that you can simply run iTunes and restore the file by holding the “Shift” key and click the “Restore” button on the iPod Summary screen. Others tell you that the iTouch needs to be in “Recovery” mode where the device has an iTunes icon and a USB cord on its display indicating it needs to be repaired. I tried these methods for about an hour and was unsuccessful. It seems that something in the iTunes software (i’m running 7.6) or in the 1.1.3 firmware is dead-set on keeping you from downgrading. So I finally starting watching YouTube and came across a video by a YouTuber who seems very young to me and was nearly incomprehensible in his directions but gave me the keys that I needed to finish downgrading to 1.1.1. There is a kit called “AutoDown” that you can obtain here that helped me reset my iTouch to a point where the Shift-Restore sequence from iTunes would actually work.

Basically, you close iTunes, open Task manager (Ctl-Alt-Del on most Windows systems) and kill iTunesHelper.exe. Note that your iTouch should still be connected by USB when you first close iTunes. Now unzip autodown.zip and run the AutoDown batch file which will repeat the instructions on close iTunesHelper and then ask you to press Enter a couple of times. After executing some commands on your iTouch the software will eventually stop without warning. After this happens, run iTunes again, hold Shift and click Restore on the iTouch/iPod Summary page. Select the ipsw file that you downloaded earlier (iPod1,1_1.1.1_3A110a_Restore.ipsw) and start the restore. I had performed this step a dozen times with slightly different variations but wasn’t successful until I ran AutoDown first. Now for the Jailbreak.

2) You know…in the movies, the jail break is usually the dramatic part of the process. In this case, after the downgrade, you simply go to http://jailbreakme.com using the Safari browser on your iTouch. When the page appears, scroll to the bottom and select the “Install AppSnapp” link. After various gyrations, the iTouch will lock itself. When you unlock it, an Installer icon should be present on your iTouch. Select this icon and browse the 3rd party apps to install…PocketGuitar was one of these…2 hours later and my daughter has everything she needs to get in trouble in school tomorrow…but she’s happy and she thinks her dad is a hero…today anyway

Yes, I know I said 2 steps…the first step (the downgrade) took me about 1 hour and a half.  The second step took about 2 minutes.  Hopefully, this article will save you at least a hour of time trying to accomplish the same thing.   Unless of course, you already spent the hour before you found this article

Since all evidence points to the PocketGuitar application only working on 1.1.1 (jailbroken of course), she can’t upgrade to the latest firmware but that doesn’t seem to be a big issue for now.

Apple…please release the SDK and allow your customers to take advantage of the creativity, talent and sheer persistence of the Open Source community. Most of the software that is available is very good and some of it is brilliant!

Good luck!