dfbills.com blog

From the latest woot! at woot.com:

“Aww, poor baby! Your iPhone crashed? You mean you marched along with the pied marketing pipers and paid way too much for a first-generation product? You mean you didn’t realize that you were being used as a lab rat? You didn’t think that a big corporation would take your money for something that hadn’t been totally debugged?

Pardon us while we wipe away a tear.

Of laughter.”

Gotta love those woot! guys.. the entertain me AND sell me crap!

iPhone really needs a search mechanism.  I’ve used mine since launch day and one thing I really do miss from my BlackBerry is simple contact search. 

My iPhone has over 3000 contacts and scrolling by letter takes too long.  A simple solution was to create some new groups in the Mac “Address Book.” That was great, but why not use “Smart Groups?”

I setup several Smart Groups and got ready to sync.  That’s when I found out that the iPhone cannot sync Smart Groups.  What a pain!

My solution was to write an AppleScript to copy from the Smart Group “Smart Restaurants” to a “Dumb Group” called “Restaurants” which can be synched to iPhone.

Here’s my script:  (saved to /Library/Scripts/)

Seems to be faster to run this from the shell script than in Script Editor and it makes sense to use osascript since I’m calling via Cron at 3am nightly.

Now, I just need to do my daily sync first thing in the morning and I’m up to date.  Thanks to Craig Smith and Niel for their assistance.

Saw this on my way to brunch today.  Would you believe it’s a laundrymat?  Honest- check out the laundry bag to the left of the sign.

LinkedIn will be adding photos tomorrow.  Do I see a small crack in their conservative website?  Stay tuned for my appropriately conservative photo.

News courtesy of TechCrunch

Update 09.30.07: I’m conservative’d.

One of the sites I work on, Songwriter101, has been experiencing problems in the forums- Chinese drive-by spammers.  The forum moderators had been deleting posts for weeks by users called shoesnew, Hu, ch, shoeman and the like.  They were all posting about the same topic- deals on sneakers, athletic wear, etc.

My team was pulling out their hair.  “Of all things… why shoes?? Do these spammers think that songwriters have a thing for purchasing new shoes? I could understand if they were spamming guitar strings or something, but shoes???”

I asked if there were any good deals.. and then knew I had to deliver a solution.  After playing the cat and mouse game for some time with suspending the userids and banning the IPs, it was time for something more drastic.

A quick Google search pulled up a great site with complete IP blocks in several formats.  A bit of htaccess tweakery with the CIDR files and now, we’re Chinese spam-free! 

(I’m quite proud of the ”error message.")

From the moderators: “And… today is the first day all week of spam-free moderating. Thank you!!  ...enjoy the absence of sneaker ads.”