Turn your iPhone into a Name Tag
Have a new iPhone? Found yourself staring at the beautiful screen instead of socializing with people? Here’s an application to help you with your iPhone addiction.
mkaz.com
personal blog of marcus kazmierczak
iPhone Name Tag
Incompatible Adapters, Why Apple Why?
I don’t get this one, some very poor incompatibility between Apple power adapters. The key to modular systems is that the pieces should fit together. Did Apple engineers as kids always forced that square peg through the round hole?
The new iPhone dock comes with a ridiculously short cable and the USB adapter only has a prong to plug into the wall. However, the modular power adapter system looks like it should work with the Macbook power cord to get the needed distance to the wall but alas, Apple’s left hand and right hand decided not to talk.
Or is Apple really being that cheap to milk a few more dollars so you must buy new international adapters and cables?
PHP: How to Fix Double Posting
When submitting a form, a user may click the submit button twice, they may reload the posted form, or hit back in their browser. Most of these will cause the form to be submitted twice and likely posted twice to the database.
Here’s one way to solve double posting, the process is:
- generate a unique key and include it with the form HTML
- when processing the form insert the unique key into the database table: transactions
- the transactions table has a UNIQUE INDEX on the key field
- if the insert fails, means there is a duplicate key, bail out of creating new one
- batch job runs daily to clean up old transactions so the insert and index is kept tidy
Here’s a bit of code, writing it on-the-fly, so you may have to fix any typos or forgotten semi-colons. We use smarty templates and have custom functions built, so not as easy to share the exact code.
First you need to setup your transactions table:
CREATE TABLE transactions (
transaction_key varchar(24),
UNIQUE INDEX uki (transaction_key)
);
transaction_key varchar(24),
UNIQUE INDEX uki (transaction_key)
);
A simple PHP function to get a unique id, abstracted in case you want to change it later:
function get_transaction_key() {
return uniqid(”, true);
}
return uniqid(”, true);
}
The main function which checks if the key has been used before:
function check_transaction_key($key) {
$return_value = db_insert(” INSERT INTO transactions (transaction_key) VALUES (’$key’) “);
if ($return_value === false) { return false; }
else { return true; }
}
$return_value = db_insert(” INSERT INTO transactions (transaction_key) VALUES (’$key’) “);
if ($return_value === false) { return false; }
else { return true; }
}
Your PHP+HTML Template Script:
<form>
<input type=”hidden” name=”transaction_key” value=”<?=get_transcaction_key()?>”>
… extra form stuff…
</form>
<input type=”hidden” name=”transaction_key” value=”<?=get_transcaction_key()?>”>
… extra form stuff…
</form>
Your PHP Form Process Script:
if (check_transaction_key($_REQUEST['transaction_key'])) {
… fun form processing …
}
… fun form processing …
}
NOTE: The sample code above should not be considered best practices. Your PHP+HTML should be in a nice template and you should scrub all your submitted variables before doing anything with them.
Powerset, natural language search platform
I attended a special event at Powerset on Thursday, where they opened up what they are working and planning on. Powerset, if you hadn’t heard, is a new search start-up looking at becoming a relevant player in the search game. Their not-so secret weapon is natural language technology they licensed from Xerox PARC.
As far as technology goes, what they demoed was impressive; however search queries were over a controlled and limited set of data. The two primary examples were over Wikipedia, which is their primary test set and searches over movie data from IMDB. A question is will Powerset be able to keep high quality results when indexing less structured and less authoritative data, such as the entire internet.
Natural language search can be quite impressive, especially over known and structured data. While working at E*TRADE, I evaluated natural language search from iPhrase to power our customer service. This worked quite well; especially since we had the extra advantage to know a user’s query would be regarding financial services, account information or the like. A user searching for “how do I deposit money” would get excellent results.
One of the issues that we did come across in testing is that user’s have learned to search via keyword; thus unlikely to type sentences or phrases which the natural language engine craves. However, users are fast learners and UI clues can help solve this. iPhrase was not picked as the search vendor, but I believe the issue finally came down to price and politics and not the technology.
Now is Powerset’s natural language search going to be a destination site to compete with Google, Yahoo and the other big players, this is their current goal. However, I think the true power of their technology will work best in smaller known scopes, such as a licensed search appliance. They do plan to have open APIs and encourage all sorts of mashups; so their success may come from developers creating these specific apps on top of Powerset.
A last thing about Powerset which I really like, they have a culture of open development. They plan on launching Powerlabs in September. Powerlabs will be a community site around their product. Users will be able to submit ideas, post bugs, and play with the latest releases giving feedback on search quality. True, who wouldn’t want free QA and free product ideas from the community. Still most companies don’t have this openness and definitely not before launching the product itself.
Only time will tell, I look forward to September.
Here are some related links: Danny Sullivan posts about Natural Language Search Hype and Dan Farber has an in-depth report of the Powerset event.
GigaCrunchBeat a Yahoo Pipe
I wrote about Yahoo Pipes previously and finally got around to playing with it. I ended up creating a very simple “pipe” which combines the RSS feeds from GigaOm, TechCrunch, VentureBeat and Mashable. I call it GigaCrunchBeat, Mashable is implied.
I import this feed into one module on my start page instead of four, works quite well. This doesn’t even scratch the surface of the power of Yahoo Pipes. With Pipes, you have an assortment of functions which allow you to process, analyze, combine feeds in various ways. Browse through the Pipes directory to find other user created pipes.
No Plan, No Capital, No Model… No Problem
I was lucky enough to be on a panel last week at the Churchill Club, I was a last minute fill in for Ann. The panel was about starting a start up with little to no capital. I’m not sure about the “no plan” or “no problem” part of the title. The panel was great, the other entrepreneurs were:
· Markus Frind, Founder of PlentyofFish.com,
· James Hong, Co-Founder of HotorNot.com,
· Dave Lu, CEO of Fanpop and
· Karen Northup, CEO and Founder of CoreFino.
Each of us discussed the different tracks the companies took to get started; from just playing with software at home, to starting with a little cash and stretching it as far as it can go, to using (and abusing) all your friends bandwidth that you can scrounge up. :) The panel was lead by Guy Kawasaki, who posted the full length video of the talk on his blog.
Full Video: No Plan, No Capital, No Model… No Problem
Sugimoto exhibit coming to de Young
Hiroshi Sugimoto is one of my favorite photographers. I’m excited an exhibit of his coming to the de Young museum in San Francisco. The exhibit is a 30-year retrospective on his career, with over 100 photographs. The photo at right is from his theaters series, which he leaves his camera open for the entire length of a movie. See my review of Sugimoto Architecture book.
Exhibit runs from July 7, 2007 to September 23, 2007 at the de Young museum in Golden Gate Park. More info: Hiroshi Sugimoto Exhibit [thinker.org]
Photo: It is raining in Paris
Weather Report: it is raining in Paris.
“Thanks, I don’t need a bag.”
A few simple words that can do a small bit for the environment. As you may have heard, San Francisco is banning plastic bags. You can take it a step further and not use either paper or plastic.
Thanks, I don’t need a bag.
How many times are you buying one or two things at the store and they put it in a plastic bag? I just bought a pack of batteries today and it was put in a plastic bag. How hard is it to carry a pack of batteries? So next time you can carry all your items, go bag less.
Spring Training 2007 (video)
A video I made from our Spring Training trip in Scottsdale, Arizona to see the San Francisco Giants. Enjoy!
