Technology Posts

Advertising And Twitter

Technology

I’ll admit, I don’t get it. It’s been four years now and yet Twitter is pushing forward with an advertising based revenue model (at least, pushing forward via a 3rd party). I’m not Twitter, and for me to sit on the sidelines and recommend a revenue model for a service I’m not a part of is pretty weak. But that said, I honestly think people would pay for a Pro twitter service if Twitter would simply offer one. I think back to my days in the BBS era when we would all pay $50 (this is back in 1990, so probably more like $100 now) simply to have a (+) next to our BBS name. That’s a form of vanity advertising, but it works. If you’re to be compared against your peers, you don’t want to look cheap. That’s especially true if you have a business. People can make threats […]

Paypal Falls Over For The Day

Technology

We had a customer email us today saying they were having some issues with PayPal. For the most part, PayPal is pretty reliable when it comes to purchases for us, and we don’t notice any hiccups. But today it seems like something was amiss within the computer walls at PayPal. The post on PayPal’s blog today said: Anuj from the PayPal comms team here. I wanted to let everyone know that we’re experiencing an issue on PayPal.com. It started at 8am PT today and means that almost all our members are having difficulty logging into their accounts and sending or receiving money from PayPal. We are working to get this fixed and I’ll update this blog post as soon as I have more information. While we did have a small issue this morning, for the most part things seemed to run mostly smooth for the rest of the day. That […]

Technology To Take Along

PreparationTechnology

It would be pretty hard to call myself a Migratory Nerd if I wasn’t in fact a pretty big technology nerd. Thankfully, I have enough photography and technological gear around here that it’s pretty easy to describe myself as a nerd. In a perfect world, I’d be able to bring everything along with me. But given that I want to travel with a 40L backpack, I’m not really going to have a ton of room in there. The following is a list of the technology I’ll be bringing along on my little adventure. 13″ Macbook Pro The idea that people used to once travel the world for months at a time without really being able to contact home seems pretty foreign to me in this day and age. Even five years ago when I was on a fairly remote trip to Costa Rica there was always an internet cafe close […]

Cool Additions to the iPhone

Technology

I’ve said it before, but I’m going to say it again: I think the iPhone would be a lot cooler if it had a temperature sensor on it. In terms of technology, all it is a single temperature controlled resistor (called a thermistor), probably worth about 5 cents. But it would be cool to be on a patio and be able to see how hot it is. I also think that if everyone opted in to given this data to a central repository, that it would be possible to increase the accuracy of our existing weather models a great deal. Currently weather models are primed using sparse initial conditions. For example, in Vancouver, I believe the only data comes from downtown, the north shore, and a weather station out in Richmond. So, three points representing a whole city. Another good idea came from my friend Alex – having a pressure […]

The Cellular Canary In The Coal Mine?

Technology

When I posted about the iPhone 4 a few weeks ago, a few people thought I might be smoking crack to think that people buying unlocked phones would have any impact on the cell phone industry in Canada. While that still remains to be seen, Rogers just announced that they’re willing to sweeten a 3 year contract by $100, which in my mind is a direct result of the lack of people signing up (or extending their current contract) to a 3 year contract compared to previous iPhone launches. Obviously that’s just my gut feeling, but it’s in line with my previous thinking regarding people wanting to jump from contracts, and the cellular industry’s attempt to keep people in them. You can read about it here.

iPhone 4: First Impressions

Technology

I spent the majority of the day yesterday waiting in a huge line-up at Vancouver’s Pacific Centre Apple store. Doors opened at 7am, but thanks to a late night wine-filled game of Cranium, yours truly wasn’t quite up to snuff at 7am. I strolled down at around 9:15am or so, only to be greeted with a line that not only snaked all the way down the halls inside the mall, but had spilled out onto the streets, wrapping down Granville for about 3/4 of a block. I ran into my friend Dave at the store. Despite a level 4 hangover, Dave managed to get there around 7am and secure a pretty nice spot in line. Thankfully Dave let me hang out next to him for the remainder of the day (also known as helping me budge in line), which saved me around 2 hours of waiting. Waiting in line that […]

iPhone 4 in Canada

Technology

Yes sports fans, it’s almost that time. On Friday the highly anticipated successor to the iPhone 3GS is released. My experience so far with Rogers wireless this last week, as well as on launch days in the past, seems to indicate that Friday is going to be a complete gong show for everyone involved. Unlike the previous launches, we now have an interesting option in Canada: we can purchase an unlocked phone from the Apple store. Unless I’m mistaken, I don’t believe we’ve ever had that luxury in Canada, at least not with Rogers. I remember getting my first Motorola phone back in 2000 – the guy at the counter had to punch in the 6 digit subsidy code simply to activate it. Of course, without that code it is impossible to change carriers, which is one of the ways carriers try to keep you locked to their service. My […]

The BP Oil Spill

Technology

As we all know, oil has been gushing out into the Gulf of Mexico now since April 20th, nearly six weeks now. It’s an unprecedented environmental disaster that will damage the economies of many of the communities along the affected shorelines, and also impact the wildlife in those areas. 11 people lost their lives in the original explosion, and I can’t even fathom how many birds and fish have probably died as well. This is an accident that many people believe should not have happened. In an ideal world, there would have been multiple blowout preventers and a chain of quick-to-implement disaster recovery schemes that could have patched the well up in short order. Unfortunately, we don’t live in an ideal world, as evidenced by the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger, the self destruction of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, and the collapse of the World Trade Centre buildings, despite […]

Why I Hate Shaw Cable

Technology

Seriously. It’s a massive slap in the face to be on hold for over an hour with a company while they’re playing on-hold advertisements talking about how much better their customer service is than everyone else’s. My internet has been slowing down consistently month after month to the point where it’s become nearly unusable. I’m paying for one of their higher end packages which is supposed to give up to 15 Mbps downstream and up to 1 Mbps downstream. Here’s what it’s been like for the last few weeks: Right now I’m getting 4 Mbps downstream, and only 76 kbps upstream, with ping times of around 400ms – absurd. The plan below me offers 10 Mbps, so at the very least I should be guaranteed that, otherwise what am I paying for? The upstream is completely pathetic, and doesn’t even allow me to start up video on iChat anymore. I’ve […]

Moving IMAP Folders With ImapSync

Technology

We’re in the process of moving some servers around right now, and one of the things we need to do is move mail accounts around. I’ve been a big fan of IMAP over POP for a few years now, mainly because the messages are kept up on the server, which ultimately keeps every machine looking roughly the same. The unfortunate aspect of that is that when you move servers you have to find a way to get the messages over to their new home. One of the more obvious ways to move messages is to proxy them through your own personal machine. To do that, you simply need to set up both accounts in a mail program like Apple Mail and start moving things around. You can create a local folder on your machine, and simply drag all the folders from the source mail account into your new folder. Depending […]