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Fracture: Break your iPhone! You tap the iPhone to “crack” the screen and then you tap again to cause the apps to explode, triggering the rest of the apps to explode in rapid succession. Unfortunately Fracture will not see the light of day as Apple has denied putting it in the App Store "because it uses standard iPhone screen images in a non-standard way, potentially resulting in user confusion".

I hope Visuamobile changes Fracture to allow the user to use any image in their photostream. If they do this, and Apple grants them the privilege to sell the app in the App store, I will buy the app and use snapshots of the iPhone and still have fun.

Just finished the audio version of Anathem by Neal Stephenson. Since the book has been out for almost a year, after the jump I am not going to worry about "minor" spoilers. If you have not read the book, the short review is...

It's not as good as Snow Crash or The Diamond Age, however it is very good. The story is extremely compelling and well written. The further into the book I got, the harder it was to put it down. As when I'm actually reading dead pulp, I found myself staying up hours past my normal bed time trying to get to a "good" stopping point that would never come. I have problems with the ending, but they are not enough to prevent my strong recommendation for the book.

Anathem on Amazon.
Track Anathem's price on PriceChirp.(audio)

More follows....

This week I added sitemap files to my rails site PriceChirp. Sitemaps are used to help search engines to find all your content. They are especially helpful in enumerating pages that are difficult for web crawlers to discover, such as content from database searches.

The web is full of instructions on how to generate sitemaps on the fly using rxml templates. This does not scale well if your site has thousands of links. A better method is to periodically generate site maps and serve these cached files when requested.

www.fortytwo.gr has a good example for generating sitemaps with rails. I've taken his code and fixed/extended it to fit my needs.

Understanding Sitemaps

Google's sitemap howto.

Basically, there are two types of sitemap files:

Enjoying the day at Photocamp Houston 2009 at the Houston Technology Center. Learned about TTV (through the viewfinder) photography, copyright laws, lighting and how to make movies. Below is a quick movie I made while at Photocamp.

Had a problem with iTunes today when I ran out of disk space while downloading some new podcasts. To quickly get some space, I deleted a hand full of podcasts to make room for new ones. After I recovered some space elsewhere on the drive, I returned to iTunes to restore a handful of podcasts I didn't really want to delete.

Problem is, once I deleted a podcast, there appeared to be no way to restore it. Using the "refresh" podcast option did not return these items to the list, nor are there any options in the menus to restore the deleted podcasts.

After poking around the web, I discovered that on a Mac, clicking on the triangle next to the podcast name while holding the "option" key, will return all the deleted episodes to the podcast's list. Not having a Mac, I tried the Ctl, Alt, and shift keys while clicking the triangle.

Eureka! "Shift" clicking the triangle restored the missing podcasts to the list allowing me to download them again. I also discovered "Control" clicking the triangle will open or collapse all podcasts at once.

I can understand why a deleted podcast is removed from the play list as normally once I delete a podcast, I am done with it. However, I would have thought it would have been documented somewhere how to restore these files.

 

Adine and I just returned from an excellent 10 day road trip to Las Vegas and back. On the way we visited the San Antonio River Walk, Flag Staff, the Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Taos. Can't wait until our next vacation.

Wordle “word cloud” for evatt.com.

Adine, Hala (@TheHza), Katie (@nadnuk) and myself formed Team Fashionably Late in yesterday's Scavenger Hunt. The scavenger hunt started at Onion Creek and finished at Big Top Lounge. We had 6 hours to take photos of as many items on their list as possible. Most items could be found inside the loop. We wound up in 6th place out of 16 teams. I would definitely love to do it again.

We all had a blast!

On my way to Albany, I listened to Resistance, an fun sci-fi short story on Escape Pod by Tobias Buckell. Resistance is about a society that is a "techno-democracy", that is every person in the society votes on every issue. After some time, they realize this is impractical. Their solution is to create computer models, "avatars", for each person to vote the way they would have voted. Eventually, each of these "avatars" does the same thing and creates a master avatar to rule as a "benevolent dictator".

I really enjoyed the story, especially the timing of it being around the election. I only wish the story had ended about two minutes earlier.