Just a few years ago, Greenpeace would regularly call out Apple for their environmental impact. In that time, they've managed to climb a few ranks, mostly on the back of their efforts eliminating toxic chemicals like PVC. Kudos to them.
Not to minimize the efforts of other companies high on that list. Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba, Phillips, LG, Sony, Motorola, and Samsung, you guys rock for not polluting all over the place.
I wish I had found this article months ago. In it, Chris Hanson demonstrates how to merge multiple model files into one contiguous model object at runtime. This can be useful in many situations, such as large models with lots of entities, and scattered models in separate plugins. Extremely informative.
Ars Technica:
ChangeWave queried 4,068 current and potential smartphone consumers last month and noted that a full 21 percent said that they would prefer Android on their next smartphones—a jump of 15 percentage points from the year before. Comparatively, 28 percent of respondents said they would prefer iPhone OS; this makes the iPhone the leader in this category, though this number dropped four percentage points year over year.
Many iPhone developers and Apple enthusiasts are quick to shrug off the Android platform, for a variety of reasons ranging from aesthetic and design, to functionality and developer tools. Many of these criticisms are certainly valid. But iPhone has its own share of problems, and certainly is deficient in many ways to the Android.
With Google's press conference tomorrow, and CES for the remainder of the week, there will be a lot of focus on the Android platform. It will become a much stronger platform in 2010. It will be interesting to see how Apple responds with iPhone OS 4.0 (which history suggests they'll probably talk about in March).
The Iranian anti-government protests are still occurring, months after the original protests occurred.
Credit to AFP/Getty Images, and Boston.com.
Twitter uses OAuth as its supported form of authentication. This is fine for some apps like clients where users need to authenticate themselves, but it doesn't work well for bots or scripts run by one person. If the bot needs an access token, it can be a real pain to obtain without writing the intermediate code.
This application, OAuthery, serves a simple purpose. You supply it the consumer key and secret for your OAuth application. It creates a request token and the URL for authorizing it. You complete the authorization in a web browser and get a PIN number. You then enter that PIN number back into the application, and it spits out your access key and secret. At this point, the user authentication is complete, and you can add those credentials to your script, and access API resources.
This is largely intended as a developer tool for people developing applications with Twitter's OAuth impelmentation. It also provides code to show exactly how to perform the authentication process with OAuth and Twitter, so that developers who wish to implement such functionality in their own apps can use this as reference.
Inactive, because it's a simple tool that serves a limited purpose.
I finally got around to fixing my Chyrp installation, so I can resume my bloggingness. I still quite enjoy Chyrp, so I've upgraded it to 2.0 final and am back to using it again. I've made some changes that will hopefully improve the experience.
First, I've removed the ability for people to post comments. Very little good comes of enabling comments; rather, they attract spam and drive-by comments which are unproductive. Most people who do respond will do so via Twitter.
Second, the auto-posting to Twitter is still going to happen. However, many people were understandably annoyed when I would post a link to the blog, and the auto-tweet would post a link to the blog, needing to click another link to get to the actual content. I toyed with the idea of framing the link content, but popular opinion says that it's a greedy and inappropriate thing to do. Instead, I made the following improvements to ensure that links cross-posted will be a little less awful:
- text posts and project announcements will link to the blog,
- link posts will have a direct link posted,
- photo posts will be direct-linked where possible, but will link to the blog if there's no direct link
- video posts will link to the blog, because YouTube is full of idiots
Third, I've created this site design after a couple months of working on it, named Cream. It's meant to be extremely minimalist and to emphasize the page content. It's nearly complete, and will be open-sourced when it's done.