iPhoneer Blog
August 4, 2010
The next time I'm dreaming, I want to remember I'm dreaming
Scientific American article
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August 3, 2010
Ten key indicators show global warming "undeniable": Scientific American
-- Higher temperatures over land
-- Higher temperatures over oceans
-- Higher ocean heat content
-- Higher near-surface air temperatures (temperatures in the troposphere, where Earth's weather occurs)
-- Higher humidity
-- Higher sea surface temperatures
-- Higher sea levels
-- Less sea ice
-- Less snow cover
-- Shrinking glaciers
Scientific American: Ten key indicators show global warming "undeniable"
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August 2, 2010
How Can You Control Your Dreams?: Scientific American #inception
"That we can control our own dreams is quite true and really much more so than people seem to know or realize. The details of how to do it are very different depending on whether you're trying to induce lucid dreams, whether you're trying to dream about particular content or whether you're trying to dream a solution to a particular personal or objective problem. "
http://bit.ly/9P2VRU
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July 29, 2010
Religious leaders should be held accountable when their irrational ideas turn harmful
Every two years the National Science Foundation produces a report, Science and Engineering Indicators, designed to probe the public’s understanding of science concepts. And every two years we relearn the sad fact that U.S. adults are less willing to accept evolution and the big bang as factual than adults in other industrial countries.
Except for this time. Was there suddenly a quantum leap in U.S. science literacy? Sadly, no. Rather the National Science Board, which oversees the foundation, chose to leave the section that discussed these issues out of the 2010 edition, claiming the questions were “flawed indicators of scientific knowledge because responses conflated knowledge and beliefs.” In short, if their religious beliefs require respondents to discard scientific facts, the board doesn’t think it appropriate to expose that truth.
The section does exist, however, and Science magazine obtained it. When presented with the statement “human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals,” just 45 percent of respondents indicated “true.” Compare this figure with the affirmative percentages in Japan (78), Europe (70), China (69) and South Korea (64). Only 33 percent of Americans agreed that “the universe began with a big explosion.”
Faith and Foolishness — Scientific American
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July 20, 2010
Boredom can be lethal
Technoccult: http://bit.ly/cdOslc
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July 2, 2010
Great PCMagazine article explaining how to print from an iPad
«iPad printing apps claim to do a lot, but in our testing, many of them simply didn't work. There's definitely still room for a brilliant third-party app which can print to a range of Wi-Fi printers, because we couldn't find one. The best we could find was Air Sharing HD, an app that reliably prints to printers shared by Macs on the same Wi-Fi network as your iPad, but even that had some formatting oddities.
There are three basic types of iPad printing apps. The first, supposedly, print directly to Wi-Fi-enabled printers. The second look out on your Wi-Fi network for Macs sharing printers, and can print to the shared printers without any intervention from the Mac's user. This is a decent solution if you go somewhere with Macs and printers. The third type requires you to run a server in the background on a Mac or PC every time you want to print something. I consider that an unforgivable kludge; at that point, you might as well just sync your iPad… http://bit.ly/ce58Gp »
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Cops using Will.i.am's iPad to track down thief
«… law enforcement officials have honed in on the the perpetrator using the iPad's GPS functionality, and are close to making an arrest…» http://bit.ly/bf1UjX [TUAW]
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June 30, 2010
iPhone: How to restore 3G data after upgrading to iOS4
These are the steps I followed to restore the 3G data connection:
1. Download "iPhone Configuration Utility" from Apple site:
2. Run the "iPhone Configuration Utility" and select "Configuration Profiles" from the left sidebar.
3. Click "New" on the toolbar.
4. Fill the "General" section with a name, identifier and description of your choice for the profile.
5. Fill the "Advanced" section with the details of your phone carrier. For Telcel (Mexico) I provided these values:
- APN: internet.itelcel.com
- User: webgprs
- Password: webgprs2002
- Proxy: 148.233.151.240
6. Connect your iPhone using USB and select it on the left sidebar.
7. Go to the "Configuration Profiles" and click 'Install' on your profile.
And done, you must have now 3G data again.
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A Task Management Service — tip via @nttd
Staying productive is hard, what with all the exciting ways to waste time the Internet provides.
Fortunately, there’s Action Method, a service that helps your organize and execute all your projects.
Start by creating a new action—cleaning out your storage room, say—and assigning it to a project, be it work-related or personal.
Action Method allows you to delegate tasks to other people using their email address. You can even send a “nag” to remind someone of a task you assigned to them.
If there’s a work in progress that requires some input, you can begin a discussion thread (this is great for avoiding email inbox overload). You can even upload pictures and documents for quick feedback.
The first 50 new action steps are free. After that, the service costs $12 a month or $99 for a year (there’s also a free iPhone app).
Use it or you may end up being showcased on a future episode of Hoarders.
Visit Action Method: http://netted.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=ea7544b086a8473bd90e4c1e3&id=4c0989bee4&e=aac23f4330
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June 29, 2010
3 Tips for Writing Reader-Friendly Memos
In business today, readers are time-pressed, content-driven, and decision-focused. To write effectively, remember that they want simple and direct communications. Here are three tips for giving readers what they want and need:
1. Avoid complex phrasing. Writing elegantly is not important; delivering smart content is. Let the message stand out more than your language.
2. Be concise. Many memo writers get hung up on "flow." But flowing sentences tend to be long and dense. You don't need choppy sentences, just hardworking ones that deliver content concisely.
3. Skip the jargon. Jargon can be a useful way to communicate among experts, but you should never use jargon if it's meaningless, if you don't understand it, or when your audience isn't familiar with it.
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June 7, 2010
LOST ending in corporate language by ExecuNet
So, in the end, LOST turned out to be a helluva long job interview. For those who didn't spend the last six years alternately fascinated and frustrated by the series, I'll translate it into corporate language:
Like many good leaders, Jacob, knowing his tenure was coming to a close, had a succession plan. Well in advance of retirement, he started filling his talent pipeline and selected his top potential replacements. Due to the "unavailability" of some of his recruits at the last stages of the interview, very few candidates made it to the final slate.
The position came with tremendous responsibility and Jacob elected the candidates undergo an arduous series of situational interviews to assess their skills and qualifications. Plane crashes, death, destruction, explosions, polar bears, time travel, electromagnetism, good Locke/bad Locke, and a smoke monster — all to determine who was most qualified for the role of island caretaker.
An interview is an opportunity for candidates to evaluate if the role is a good fit for them too, and of those remaining — Jack, Hurley and Sawyer — two seem less certain they want the position. So Jack selects himself as Jacob's replacement, and when he inquires about the length of his employment contract, Jacob tells Jack he must do the job as long as he can.
Instead of a handshake, Jack drinks from Jacob's cup, and immediately begins onboarding into his new role by accompanying the evil John Locke on a business trip into a cave. But Jack is among the 12 percent that ExecuNet-surveyed recruiters report don't complete their first year in a new job and during a hostile takeover, he learns this role was only for a turnaround specialist on an interim assignment.
Before his exit interview, Jack expediently manages the institutional knowledge transfer to Hurley, who, with his servant leadership qualities, turns out is better suited for the longer term role.
The end.
ExecuNet
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April 25, 2010
Instaviz for iPad is unstable and not iPad style
But the app is really unstable, I've using it for an hour and it's the first iPad app I have that crashes every single time (I have around 40 iPad apps and 100+ iPhone apps). And to make things worse it doesn't save anything, so, if in the middle of your work you want to delete something, be prepared to lose all of your nodes.

If you want to use this for Process drawing be warned that the app doesn't appropriately handle multiple arrows between two shapes, this is annoying if you're trying to use a Diamond as a conditional to return to the previous step.

And its looks and edit style is so iPhone-ish that you can easily tell that it's the same application with a bigger canvas, developers didn't even try to take advantage of the bigger screen and to define a smoother way to rename nodes.
I give Instaviz two stars just for the way it recognizes what you draw, and that's all about this app.
-- Desde Mi iPad
March 29, 2010
Create a custom search provider in IE8 for your favorite sites
In our company we have a governance tool and several times a day I need to search for requests given their number.
- Someone send me request ID to review.
- I open the governance tool.
- I click search request.
- I enter the request ID and click search.
And that's it, after you enter a name and press Install you can type you can search on your site using the standard search bar on IE8.
March 28, 2010
Disable Narrator on Windows 7
So I tried to get rid of it but even when I closed it, Windows 7 reopen it on every restart. Clicking on the Control Panel I found how to disable it for good:
- Control Panel
- Ease of Access
- Ease of Access Center
- Use the computer without a display
- Uncheck> Turn on Narrator
October 13, 2009
Steps that worked for me to jailbrake my iPhone 3G 3.1.2 using #blackra1n
- Plug the iPhone in the computer.
- In iTunes uncheck the option "Automatically sync this iPhone when connected".
- Close iTunes.
- Optional: Several posts recommend to kill the iTunes/iPod processes, but I didn't see a difference doing this.
- Start Blackra1n and press the button "Make it rain".
- You should see the iPhone going to recovery mode (USB and iTunes logo) and Blackra1n changing to "Running". If you see this for more than 30 seconds then the process has failed. This is what happens on iPhones 3G.
- Close Blackra1n.
- Start Blackra1n again, but DO NOT press the button.
- Hold Power and Home buttons on your iPhone. Don't release the buttons, you must see the screen going black,
- After some seconds you must see the Apple logo, release the Power button, holding the Home button.
- Don't release Home button, you must see the recovery mode logo (USB + iTunes) and then press "Make it rain" in Blackra1n.
- Almost immediately you should see the GeoHot image instead of the Recovery mode logo.
- Release the button, and wait for the process to finish. Once the iPhone rebooted you'll see the Blackra1n app to install Cydia or RockApp.
July 5, 2009
Deming Cycle and Software » Six Sigma + CMMi + PSP/TSP
Often I've been asked on how the quality methodologies used in software are related among them. For instance, talking about Six Sigma, CMMI and PSP/TSP.
My answer is always related to Deming Circle. Deming circle is an iterative problem-solving and quality-improvement process consisting in four steps: Plan, Do, Check, Act.
In software, we use the no-physical characteristics of the products we create as an excuse to not follow an industrial practice, "Why should I care about a free-defect product when fixing it is almost free??" But it is not free, and we must use a proven practice to ensure the little defects injected in design and code don't increase the product price and schedule.
The Deming Circle consists of (from wikipedia):
- PLAN
- Establish the objectives and processes necessary to deliver results in accordance with the specifications.
- DO
- Implement the processes.
- CHECK
- Monitor and evaluate the processes and results against objectives and Specifications and report the outcome.
- ACT
- Apply actions to the outcome for necessary improvement. This means reviewing all steps (Plan, Do, Check, Act) and modifying the process to improve it before its next implementation.
As you can see, this can be easily mapped to a common development practice. But that not always happen in real life. And when a methodology is followed, it's not always at all levels, meaning some developers don't understand how the quality of the code they produce affects the entire product.
Six Sigma uses industrial practices and tools to follow this improvement circle. In a typical DMAIC process you Define what are you trying to improve, then you define a way to Measure the process status, you Analyze the gathered metrics, then decide what to Improve and, finally, you Control the process to ensure the improvement doesn't fade away.
The problem here is that Six Sigma is generic, what makes it feasible to use in any industry, but not always the ideal tool on a given one, like the software industry. In our case we need first to define a way to measure the software process and then tailor the statistical methods.
With CMMI we have an improvement quality framework for software. For different process areas we can improve using practices from a set of defined maturity levels. First we need to Manage our process, then we are able to Define it for organizational use, once defined we can Quantitatively Manage it using statistical tools, and, finally, use all this data to Optimize it.
The problem is that these practices are relatively easy to deploy for departments, groups of projects, and project managers, but very difficult to find a practical usage in a developer daily work. I, a programmer in a CMMI-5 project, may not know how to apply the available quality tools on the lines of code that I need to write right now.
And here is where PSP and TSP can help us to apply the quality philosophy on a person level. PSP ensures every individual has the basic skills for estimating, planning, quality managing and measuring his/her development process. TSP launch is a set of planning sessions that ensures every one in the project agrees on what is needed to do, how to do it, and what is the plan to follow. During project execution we use TSP Managing to ensure the plan and process is followed, to monitor and evaluate project performance, and to improve individual and team processes and support artifacts.
May 15, 2009
Bruce Schneier on Online Privacy
The courts need to recognize that in the information age, virtual privacy and physical privacy don't have the same boundaries. We should be able to control our own data, regardless of where it is stored. We should be able to make decisions about the security and privacy of that data, and have legal recourse should companies fail to honor those decisions. And just as the Supreme Court eventually ruled that tapping a telephone was a Fourth Amendment search, requiring a warrant -- even though it occurred at the phone company switching office and not in the target's home or office -- the Supreme Court must recognize that reading personal e-mail at an ISP is no different.
May 7, 2009
Restoring iPhone Apps Icons positions
It requires at least fifteen minutes after every restore to leave the app icons as they were before the update.
But keeping previous arrangement is actually pretty easy, you only need to restore from your backup twice:
- Sync and Backup before updating.
- Update iPhone OS
- When asked, choose the backup from step 1
- After the restore finishes (at least 1 hour if you have many apps and music), ^+click (or right-click) your iPhone on the device list and select “Restore from backup...”
- Choose the backup from step 1, again, and voilá, when it is done (this time is faster), the springboard icons are arranged just as before the update.
April 26, 2009
Storing sensitive information on iPhone
Now with the iPhone I use this webapp: http://passvault.ktomics.net
I like it because:
- It's easy to use and really fast since it's formatted for the iPhone.
- It has templates and categories as YAPS had.
- You can add the page as an icon on the iPhone as any app.
- You can access your data from any online computer, so you don't need to worry about losing your data if you lose or misplace your iPhone.
Anyway, you must consider that all your sensitive data is stored online, so carefully read the conditions of the service and their online FAQ.
April 23, 2009
Flock Social Browser
It’s a great idea, once you configured the supported accounts (with the exception of LinkedIn I could find the services I use the most), you can use sidebars to receive latest updates and to upload and share new content.
But yesterday I had a problem and the browser started blank, with all services and sidebars empty. Looking at GetSatisfaction.com I found a tip on deleting de sqlite configuration file, after that the services are fill again but the accounts are not configured, so I still thinking on going again, or not, through the accounts configuration procedure.
December 31, 2008
Apple TV not showing on iTunes
I just got as Christmas present an Apple TV, and while still syncing the media content from iTunes it stopped showing in the Devices list. Only 10 movies were synced and the HD movies bought in the Apple TV were not sent to iTunes.
I searched on different forums for a solution, but some of them suggested factory resetting, and I didn't want to pass through the iTunes, Podcasts and online pictures setup process again. So I kept looking for an alternative and found some posts saying that the AppleTV should be visible using 'pings'. In my case that wasn't the case. I reset my router and then I was able to ping the Apple TV new IP address.
So, if you're Apple TV is not shown in iTunes, first try to 'ping' it from a command.com or terminal window, and if it doesn't try to renew the Apple TV IP address or to reset your router.