Navarr's Tech Side

One of the few problems that have really been giving a bad rap to Windows 7 users is the loss of proper Bluetooth Connectivity on Dell Laptops, specifically the Truemobile series.  The cause is, unsurprisingly, a lack of Dell support – no updated drivers.  In fact, if I recall, my Bluetooth wasn’t working properly on Windows Vista either, which the computer came pre-installed with.  Since the problem is Dell Drivers, the solution is fairly simple:  Screw Dell, set it back to the Windows Drivers.

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The article from GameInformer magazine on the upcoming Valve title “Portal 2” have been leaked to the internet.  I’ve provided their links here for your enjoyment.

So, you think you’ve had a lot of fun with twitter on the web and all those twitter clients you’ve played around with?  What if I told you that you haven’t seen anything yet?  What if I told you that you could use Twitter in a TRUE Command Line Interface with specific commands for interacting with twitter.

Welcome to one of my latest and greatest creations, TwCLI.

TwCLI supports almost everything twitter has to offer, and will soon be expanding to support even more!  TwCLI includes a long list of commands, help information for each command, a theme-able interface (Specify a Pre-Determined theme, import from your twitter profile, or even specify an external CSS file!), Geo-Location, Retweets, and even Contributor Support!

Go ahead, give it a try and tell me what you think!

I love applications that fill in where hardware fails, but this one is really taking the cake!  Geosense for Windows gives you the capabilities of a GPS sensor in your computer (but without the actual hardware!)  It uses Google Location Services to triangulate your location and provide your coordinates to applications that request them.

Unfortunately, not many applications use this type of data (yet) but Long Zheng and Rafael Rivera are hoping that with this new default driver for PCs without GPS, that many more developers will embrace the creation of geo-location in desktop applications.

Continue Reading for Code Snippets

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Do I know for sure?  Absolutely not.  Do I have inside information?  Absolutely not.  Was I randomly observant one night and saw something that seemed to push me to think in this direction?  Yes.

Back in December, Twitter blogged about its “feature test with businesses” of a new Contribution API they were adding in to Twitter.  One that would allow companies to give users permission to tweet on behalf of the main account, and still attribute that post to the user who wrote it.

If you wanted to see this in action, all you would have to do is look at the main Twitter account, where almost every post and retweet is attributed to one of the employees.

They originally announced that this feature would improve usage of applications like @CoTweet and @HootSuite.  But if you look at their timelines, you see very little Contribution API dabble – until recently, that is.

Looking through CoTweet’s posts all the way back through December, none of them have contribution metadata – except for the latest two on February 18th and 19th.  HootSuite has only one, posted on February 18th (none earlier, and none later).  This brings to mind:  Twitter must have recently been rolling out (or testing) their Contribution Feature – or are we really supposed to expect this to be coincidence?

And all of this with the Twitter Developer Meetup Scheduled for Monday, March 1st 2009.

All I’m saying is, I think they’ve gotten much closer to rolling out Contributions.  Maybe they’ll announce it at this small developer meetup, since everybody already knows about it.  Then again, maybe they won’t.

Code block
   
// Retrieve user’s Zipcode
// Demo at http://sandbox.gtaero.net/zipcode.html
function retrieve_zip(callback)
{
	try { if(!google) { google = 0; } } catch(err) { google = 0; } // Stupid Exceptions
	if(navigator.geolocation) // FireFox/HTML5 GeoLocation
	{
		navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function(position)
		{
			zip_from_latlng(position.coords.latitude,position.coords.longitude,callback);
		});
	}
	else if(google && google.gears) // Google Gears GeoLocation
	{
		var geloc = google.gears.factory.create('beta.geolocation');
		geloc.getPermission();
		geloc.getCurrentPosition(function(position)
		{
			zip_from_latlng(position.latitude,position.longitude,callback);
		},function(err){});
	}
}
function zip_from_latlng(latitude,longitude,callback)
{
	// Setup the Script using Geonames.org's WebService
		var script = document.createElement("script");
		script.src = "http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyPostalCodesJSON?lat=" + latitude + "&lng=" + longitude + "&callback=" + callback;
	// Run the Script
		document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(script);
}
function example_callback(json)
{
	// Now we have the data!  If you want to just assume it's the 'closest' zipcode, we have that below:
	zip = json.postalCodes[0].postalCode;
	country = json.postalCodes[0].countryCode;
	state = json.postalCodes[0].adminName1;
	county = json.postalCodes[0].adminName2;
	place = json.postalCodes[0].placeName;
	alert(zip);
}
retrieve_zip("example_callback"); // Alert the User's Zipcode

Apparently I’ve completely broken simpleTAPI somewhere between Build 27 and Build 30.  I thought I had fixed it with Build 29, but it seems that I was mistaken.

In lieu of this, I am putting simpleTAPI on a temporary hiatus.  I will be re-constructing it from scratch (though, probably looking back and using a good bit of the original code).  The next version should have several configurable options, and will hopefully interact with the Twitter API much better than the previous versions.

Build 30 was supposed to return results as an array([“TAPI”] => data, [“result”] => data).  But all I’m getting from it at the moment is “Unable to Authenticate User.”

Those wanting to use simpleTAPI should use Build 27, though you will have to deal with some minor quirks in the way results are returned.  (the TAPI array is simply appended to the results array, making things slightly complicated if you don’t unset($result[“TAPI”]);

What will be simpleTAPI 0.4 should have better error handling, better return data, and better built-in caching.  I’m also hoping to build in support for xAuth and Delegated OAuth, if at all possible.  (Though probably not since simpleTAPI is built upon another OAuth library).

So, I’m asking for any and all feature requests.  Is there something about simpleTAPI you don’t like or want to be improved?  Please, post in the comments below!

Remember way back in November when I created something so ridiculously awesome I had to learn two whole new web technologies to do it?

If you don’t, or if you just picked up on my blog, that very incredibly awesome something was called Google Voice OMS – It allows you to send text messages through Outlook using your Google Voice account, without having to pay a third party company per-message.  Essentially making this very awesome feature in Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 FREE.

At first, I didn’t want to Open Source it.  I wanted to keep it for awhile and sell it to Google or something if it caught on – but there seemed to be so tiny of a reaction to the post that I published it on Github.  Do you guys seriously not like it?  I asked for SSL Hosting or Donations three months ago and I haven’t received a single cent to pay for the cost (nor an offer to host).

Not that there was really anything left to add to it, but I’ve pretty much just let the project die.  Nobody’s approached me about funding it, or providing hosting for it, and definitely not Google although it would be the best thing in the world to kick-start Google Voice for Businesses.

And I was even thinking of doing something cool like seeing if I could create a twitter client replica of it.  But you know what?  Never Mind.

I’m sure every single person in the tech world can agree that Windows Phone 7 Series is a stupid name for a product, almost as bad as iPad.

However, if we take a step back and re-think about this incredulously long name and what it means exactly, you’ll see it may not be as entirely stupid as it was at first glance.

Windows Phone 7 Series describes the combined devices that will be running this new Operating System.  Just like the older OS devices will be called Windows Phone Classic Series.  “Series” is simply an added word to describe the devices together.

Therefore, in truth, Windows Phone 7 is the name of the OS itself, which is a lot less stupid than Windows Phone 7 Series.

I’m still wondering if there is a specific way they could make the name for the series itself more appealing.

I have yet to find one that will automatically tag my vast library of music that isn’t English.

I love animé, and until about my third girlfriend I didn’t have much or any music on my computer, I didn’t watch many videos either.  My library was dull and void.  But now, I have 532 songs occupying 2.7 Gibibytes of data, and I’m pretty sure less than 100 of those are English.  Some of the music I don’t expect to get any data from, music my friends made, or I don’t know the origin of at all, but I have a lot of Japanese singles that were openings and endings from anime, or were in an anime, but all of these singles also belonged to albums, or had album artwork, or an artist, or all kinds of rich information that isn’t in my library – or are in any of the main databases.

To top it off, I tried using some auto-tagging software I don’t remember the name of anymore, didn’t clearly understand the instructions, and screwed up the tags on a whole heck of a lot of my music, so now I have some songs I don’t know the names, artists, or album info to at all as its improperly labeled (and in Japanese).

Someone (I’d be willing to help any way I could) should compile a database of the way songs sound (Some type of wavelength ID that could easily identify a song via a piece of it, identify different versions, etc.), approaching music labels and artists from the United States, Britain, Australia, Japan, and all those other countries.

Or does such software already exist, and I simply don’t know about it?  If you know something I don’t, please leave it in the comments =)