I recently purchased a Pontiac (rip) Vibe. I’m not a fan of domestic cars, but in this case, I made an exception, since the Vibe’s really a Toyota Matrix with a different logo.

The car came with a three month trial of OnStar, GM’s all purpose safety service that will help you out if your keys are locked in the car, you get in a wreck and are unresponsive, or if you need a tow or a tank of gas. Think high-tech triple-A. You can also use it as a phone, provided you’re willing to pay in the ballpark of $1.20 per minute.

I’ve been playing with OnStar since I got it, and I gotta say, it’s nothing but proof that GM doesn’t have their poop in a group.

Here’s the thing: All OnStar is, is a built in cell phone that has a one-touch dial to a call center just outside of Detroit. Plus a GPS and some sensors. That’s it. When your car wrecks (identified by sensors noticing frame damage or the airbags deploying), it places a call, and they check in to see if you need help. If you need a tow, you make the call yourself. Keys locked in the car? You call them on your mobile phone and they take care of you. They’ll even give you directions if you’re lost.

Now don’t get me wrong, this is a pretty good hack. All they did was install a phone, and pay the salary of a bunch of phone jockeys, and they can sell it as a high tech safety service. But it’s a hack. This would work fine in 2003, but these days, we expect automation, computer screens, and immediate service. I’ve got better technology in my pants. (Don’t look at me that way… I’m talking about my iPhone!)

Here’s my experience with OnStar:

Scenario 1: Keys Locked in Car

I call OnStar. Phone tree asks for my home phone number (my ID with OnStar), and walks me through a phone tree. Yes, I need emergency services. beep (This counts as an emergency, as opposed to billing questions or customer service) Okay, yes, my car’s locked. beep No, there aren’t any animals or people locked in the car. beep Please hold…

After a very brief wait (I’ve never experienced more than 30 seconds on hold, they’ve got that down pat.), I get a nice lady on the phone, who asks me for the same information I gave through the phone tree, then sends the unlock signal, and waits on the phone until I confirm the car’s unlocked — which happens almost instantly. She then asks me how my service was, how I’m doing, etc.. Finally I get her off the phone, lock my car, and go back into the house.

This is a cool trick, and it’ll be a real life saver for me one of these days. I’m terrible about locking up my keys. That said, why did I need to talk to a person? Why not punch in my ID, my secret code, and press 1 to unlock my car. Then there’s no hold time (presumably that’s why they ask whether there’s a living creature trapped in the car — to put you at the front of the queue), and no need for pleasantries. (I’m a geek, I’d rather not talk to people.)

All in all, great service, but the execution needs polish.

Scenario 2: Make a Phone Call

My OnStar system also works as a speaker phone. Keep in mind, that’s all it really is. It doesn’t, however, work with MY phone, so I have to buy minutes at exorbitant fees (over $1.20 per minute!), and call from an entirely different phone number from usual. Here’s how it goes.

*beep! OnStar Activated*
 
Me: "Call Number"
 
Car: "I didn't understand that."
 
Me: "Call Number"
 
Car: "Virtual Assistant. Say yes or no."
 
Me: "No"
 
Car: "Please repeat that."
 
Me: "NO!" (shouting)
 
Car: "Please repeat that."
 
*beep* (I manually hang up)
 
*blee boop* (I hold down the big button on my iPhone)
 
Me: "Call [My Wife's Name] Mobile"
 
iPhone: "Calling [My Wife's Name, mis-pronounced], Mobile"

In other words, awful. Awful in every way. Yeah, maybe it’s worth having a spare phone in an emergency, but this isn’t worth ten cents a minute. For my $100 to buy minutes, I can get a swell bluetooth speakerphone and call it a day.

Scenario 3: Voice Guided Directions

For my trial period, I get directions. Now, I was expecting turn-by-turn GPS stuff, but as with everything OnStar, what I actually got was a nice phone receptionist… eventually.

*beep! OnStar Ready! Connecting to OnStar advisor!*
 
Advisor: "Thank you for calling OnStar"
 
Me: "Hi. I need directions to Coopersmith's pub in Fort Collins, Colorado."
 
Advisor: "What?"
 
Me: "I need directions to Coopersmith's in Fort Collins."
 
Advisor: "Huh?"
 
Me (shouting): "I WANT DIRECTIONS TO COOPERSMITHS PUB IN FORT COLLINS COLORADO!"
 
Advisor: "Okay... Let me look that up."
 
(typing sounds)
 
Advisor: "Is that a business name?"
 
Me: "Yes."
 
Advisor: "What?"
 
Me (shouting): "YES, IT IS A BUSINESS NAME!"

(at this point, I decide to always shout, since obviously the speaker can’t keep up with the road noise as I drive down I-25)

Advisor: "Okay, I think I've found it." ("I think"???)
 
Me: "OKAY..."
 
*beep! beep! beep!*

WTF??? This is the standard OnStar hold sound. Maybe he’s loading up my GPS or something. I wait.

Advisor (a different one): "Did you need directions?"
 
Me: "YES! I'M TRYING TO GET TO COOPERSMITH'S IN FORT COLLINS!"
 
Advisor: "Okay... That's Super...? What?"
 
Me (screaming at the top of my lungs): "COOPERSMITHS! C-O-O-P-E-R-S-M-I-T-H-S!"
 
Advisor: "Okay... Just a second..."
 
*beep! Your OnStar call has ended.*

At this point, I was just curious whether I’d ever get directions. I clicked the button again and quickly got an advisor. I’ll skip the details, but she seemed to hear me okay (I was still yelling) and quickly looked up the business.

Advisor: "I can't get a street address for that. Do you know if it's at the intersection of Linden and Walnut?"
 
Me: "Yes, it is." (I guess. I'm actually not sure those roads intersect.)
 
Advisor: "Great. It's just a few turns, but if you'd like, you can download them to your car."
 
Me: "Sounds good."
 
Advisor: "Press the blue button."
 
*beep*
 
Me: "Done."
 
Advisor: "Here are the directions..." (she reads them)
 
Advisor: "Now you can press the button again."
 
*beep*
 
Me: "Done."
 
Advisor: "Great. To play back the directions, press the phone button, then say 'Virtual Advisor' and then say 'Play.' If you need to pause it, just press the phone button. When you call up the virtual advisor again, it will ask if you want to play, which starts over, or resume."
 
Me: "Great! Thanks."
 
Advisor: "Have a great day. Call us back if you need anything or have trouble finding it."
 
*beep! Your OnStar call has ended!*
 
Me: "Virtual Advisor"
 
Car: "I don't understand..."
 
etc...

All told, this took me 20 miles to complete. Good thing I was getting directions to a place that was 40 miles away, or else I would have shot past it an hour before.

Once again, OnStar proves the limitations of just being a phone. Well, a phone that can record your call. My turn by turn navigation is playing back a recording and stopping it after every turn until the next one comes up, and then hitting “play” again.

Are you serious?

This whole package, not including phone minutes, is $30/month. That’s pretty darn steep, but possibly worth it just for the emergency services. (Which costs $20 without the directions service) But overall, it’s a sad statement on GM’s technological capabilities.

I can see two ways to go with this service. One option is to just make it cheaper, and treat it like a triple-A subscription. Emergency services, $100/year. Or whatever. It would probably be worth it.

The other approach would be to just use the OnStar Advisors as what they are, people with computers that are one button away. Let them help you with more than just directions and phone numbers (for while, I have it on good authority, they just use Google Maps), and just look stuff up on the Internet, or even make some phone calls for you to find a laundromat that can press your suit before the wedding you’re attending.

Would I pay for that service? You bet! It would be a GM Concierge. Sure, it’ll require a GM car, but it would give everyone the admin assistant they’ve always wanted.

In the meantime, I’ll drive my Pontiyota (Toyotiac?), which I like a lot, and I know my wife will sleep easier knowing that if my airbags deploy, I’ll get emergency service promptly and automatically, even if I’m knocked out cold. But I have to say that it galls me to pay so much for so little.

True to form, Matthew Drayton of Nolobe got an Interarchy bug fix out a few hours ago. Most, if not all, of the bugs have been addressed. This might be a good argument for the widespread use of public betas these days.

The new app is pretty slick. Running processes on remote servers is a killer feature if ever there was one. Having a terminal session open next to your FTP program does the same thing, but having it integrated so you can select files and pass them to the process is something else entirely.

Interarchy, my long-time FTP (and SFTP, and S3, etc…) client, just got a major upgrade. Now it’s at version 10. Among its many improvements is the ability to create plugins that run programs on the server you’re connected to! So you can, for example, edit your Apache virtual hosts files, and then bounce Apache without leaving Interarchy. Extremely cool stuff.

Unfortunately, it’s chock full of bugs!

These bugs range from irritations to full on crash the application bugs, and most are the kind that seem like they should have been detected in a very modest QA check. (One button in the preferences simply kills the app if it’s running under Snow Leopard!)

Interarchy 9 had an equally spotty release. I’m assuming that a 10.1 update will be here soon, but until then, there’s a painfully buggy program out there. On the up side, of course, I can keep using version 9, and wait until 10.1 to buy the upgrade. (if I choose to do so… Transmit’s looking great these days and has a lot to recommend itself)

Now that jailbreaks are available for iOS 4 (what, no iOS X 10.4?), I went ahead and updated my phone. A couple .plist edits later, and my plain-old 3G gets background pictures and multi-tasking. Installed MyWi, which gives me tethering (without canceling my unlimited plan, thank you very much!) Thanks to iVideoCamera, I can capture video, and Vlingo gives me voice dialing.

So basically, I’ve got the functions of a 3GS, without the extra speed. Not bad for the price.

Now I’m dithering over whether to sell this phone on eBay (I figure an unlocked and contractless 16GB 3G with all these bonus features could be worth at least a few hundred bucks) and get a shiny new iPhone 4; or whether I’m better off staying the course, enjoying life without a contract (even switch carriers — if only T-Mobile’s 3G network worked with the iPhone), and maintaining the freedom to jailbreak and hack to my heart’s content.

Heck, if YOU want it, sound off in the comments. I figure $300 — the cost of the higher-trim-level iPhone 4 — is my “buy it now” price.

Thanks to Andy I for this terrific resource. CSS and web development in general really gets me down. I feel like I’m just fixing other people’s bugs all day long. Having a site like this one that inspires creativity is a real pleasure. At least until I try to make Drupal do it.

Using CSS to do Anything

I just started working with the Drupal Mailhandler module. I got jealous of Posterous, but I like geeking in Drupal so much that I couldn't bear switching over. (And yes, I know Posterous can handle cross-posting to Drupal — I like this better) Very cool stuff. I can attach images and do all kinds of neat things.
Drupal continues to impress me with what it can do. I just think about something, like "can I post by email?" and a short search later, I find out that I can. It's wonderful.
This couldn't be more of a test post, so please don't worry yourself about all the images and files. I'm just working on themeing things. Or maybe not. :)

Oh yeah…

…I’ll have to post more about how I’m using Prowl these days.

Everybody knows about using .htaccess files to redirect, say, foo.com to www.foo.com. There’s lots of cookbooks out there for doing this. But I was in a different situation; I registered foo.com, foo.biz, foo.net, foo.org, foo.mobi, foo.us, and foo.info!

(Note: “Everybody” refers to apache sysadmins, and foo refers to a domain name that I do not want to advertise at this time.)

One way to handle this would be to set up a ServerAlias entry in the httpd.conf file for every one of these domains. While this works, it doesn’t redirect the domain. Instead I end up with duplicate content for every one of these many domains.

I could handle this by writing a .htaccess file that covers every combination of, say, foo.net, foo.org, foo.biz, and so forth for every domain, but that seemed like an awful lot of typing. Yet, for some reason, I couldn’t find much of anything on the web to make this easier.

It turns out this can all be handled in your httpd.conf file using the “Redirect” directive.

What you need to do is set up two virtual hosts. One is for the domain you’re re-directing to, and the other is for any and all domains you want to redirect from. Then you add a “Redirect permanent” directive as appropriate.

Here’s an example, in which I try to route foo.com to www.foo.com:

# This is the master domain
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName www.foo.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/foo.com
</VirtualHost>

# Redirect foo.com to www.foo.com
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName foo.com
Redirect permanent / http://www.foo.com
</VirtualHost>

Okay, this is actually more text that an .htaccess mod_rewrite statement, but look at what happens when I add ServerAliases to the redirecting virtual server:

# Redirect everything to www.foo.com
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName foo.com
ServerAlias *.foo.com
ServerAlias foo.net *.foo.net
ServerAlias foo.org *.foo.org
ServerAlias foo.biz *.foo.biz
[and so on...]
Redirect permanent / http://www.foo.com
</VirtualHost>

I can use the same syntax to do a 302, 303, 401 or any other sort of redirect as well.

If you have a fairly simple array of virtual hosts, you could also use the default “catch all” virtual host to redirect to your main site, thus avoiding any need to explicitly define tons of ServerAlias entries.

Syncing the iPhone is a mess. Apple really dropped the ball by not providing a generalized sync framework to support third party apps.

Every time I want to take my iPhone out on the road with me, I need to go through and sync up every application individually: Here’s the song and dance for a full sync:

1. Open up 1Password on my Mac and on my iPhone, choose Sync from the iPhone, and wait for it to complete. (Sometimes I need to click through some password errors, too.

2. Open TextGuru on my iPhone and the TextGuru server application on my Mac and copy over any text files I’d like to share between the devices.

3. Open up Stanza on both my Mac and my phone and then open each book I want to carry with me and send it to the phone; one-by-one.

4. Load any files I want to take with me into FileMagnet uploader, open the app on my iPhone, and send them over. (Or, if I’m using Briefcase, turn on remote login on my Mac and browse it — I’ll cover file viewers/transfer apps in a later post.)

5. Open up SpeakEasy Connect to grab any recordings I want on my Mac from my phone.

6. Sync OmniFocus to .me (and then when I open it on the iPhone, it syncs up, so that’s something at least!)

7. Open up ByLine to pick up my Google Reader RSS feeds.

8. Likewise with Instapaper.

9. Did I mention I don’t use Safari as my main browser? So that’s a trip to BookDog to sync up my bookmarks from OmniWeb to Safari so that I’ll have ‘em on the phone.

10. Finally I’m ready to sync with iTunes, but to be sure I get the most out of this sync, I’ll check for new podcasts and application updates.

11. Dangit! I’m out of space for all my new files on my iPhone. Time to trim playlists, swap out movies, etc. I sure wish I could autofill the thing like I could on a shuffle!

And that’s if I happen to be on an available wifi network. Otherwise I also have to deal with Internet Sharing on my Mac!

Yeah, this is a worst-case scenario, of course. I don’t necessarily need to pick up new files or books, and I don’t always need to grab recordings. But if I intend to spend some time on an airplane or otherwise need to keep everything updated, this whole rigamarole can take as much as half an hour of fidding.

But because this is so time consuming, it’s not uncommon for my iPhone to be out of date, so I don’t have my latest passwords from 1Password, or I don’t have the movie I just rented from iTunes or eBook I’ve downloaded. (since I have to transfer it to the one device it lives on — grr!) Likewise, my Mac’s out of date from files I have on my phone. What a drag!

Some of these applications use Mobile Me or some other online service as an intermediary, so that I can sync asynchronously from my Mac or iPhone to a central server. Or ByLine syncs directly with Google Reader, so it acts like a normal RSS reader that way. But if I intend to be outside of wifi range, I have to remember to sync.

Compare this to my Palm handheld (recently retired in favor of my iPhone). I put it in the cradle and pressed the “sync” button. Any e-books or files waiting for transfer would transfer, passwords would be updated, content on the device would push back to my Mac. One click, and I was done. Palm provided a standard framework that developers could use to sync their applications’ data with my Mac and its programs.

Apple has done the same thing in the past, through iSync and Mobile Me/.Mac. However, they failed to extend this to the iPhone. Instead, every developer needs to build their own synchronization solution, with no standards whatsoever. Additionally, since there’s no background processing, there’s no method to keep the desktop and the phone in sync without forcing a manual process of opening every syncing program and doing your business, one program at a time.

Obviously there’s an underlying sync framework in iTunes, which can handle multiple content types (music, photos, email, contacts and calendars) from multiple data sources (Outlook on the PC; iPhoto, Mail, Address Book and iCal on the Mac; Google and Yahoo hosted services; and, of course, video and music through iTunes). And that’s all in addition to the built-in Mobile Me and IMAP services!

Apple dropped the ball on syncing with the iPhone. They need to build a synchronization API for developers, and they need to build it quickly before more programming time goes down the drain building half-assed custom sync solutions.

Wouldn’t you like to have Google at your fingertips wherever you go? Wouldn’t it be even cooler if you had a friend standing by to search Google for you, so that you don’t have to spend the time typing on the go? What if it was a complete stranger working for pennies on behalf of a very cool service named ChaCha?

Here’s what you do: Dial 1-800-2CHACHA (or 1-800-224-2242, if you prefer). A friendly automaton will prompt you to ask a question. Ask away, and then resume your daily business. In a minute or two, you’ll get an SMS message with an answer to your question. Pretty darn slick.

There are a few GotChas with ChaCha: Real humans are finding your answers, and they’re paid for their answers in dimes. (But they make it up in volume, I imagine) So don’t expect the sort of service you’d get from a skilled reference librarian with lots of answers at their disposal. Instead you’ll get a reasonably skilled Google/Wikipedia searcher who will be about as accurate as the same sources.

So it’s great for “I’m at this intersection and I want to find a gas station, where’s the closest one?” or “Who played Iron Man in the movie of the same name?” Not so good for “Where did I put my keys?”

Good stuff. I could easily become addicted to this service.

Hells yeah.

Vanity fair has a truly amazing article which covers the history of the internet, from ARPAnet to today, told entirely in anecdotes by the people behind the internet itself. A great, readable, and very entertaining read.

I’m a software aesthete. I like to spend my life using programs that work elegantly and beautifully. While this is partly why I prefer using my Mac to my PC, it really comes down to the individual software and tasks. There are some phenomenal PC programs that I find are a pleasure to use (Microsoft Excel 2007 is just wonderful to chart and graph in), and there are Mac programs I’m more-or-less forced to use for one reason or another that could really use some more thought into how they work. (I’m looking at you, Script Editor!)

One place that I never thought to see such a divergence in elegance was in recipe software. Look, it’s a database, right? Recipes, cookbooks, ingredients, and even shopping lists. Sounds like a job for unformatted text and a decent search function.

But when my wife bought Cook’n, the best selling recipe software on any platform (or so they claim), I found an amazing study of software design and usability.

I’ve been working on migrating this site to Drupal v6.2. In order to do so, I’ve created some test/development areas to work through the transition. These areas required me to repeatedly copy my live (version 5) database over to various test and staging servers. I researched and perfected a few one-shot command line recipes to handle all of this. I figured I’d share them with the world.

OmniWeb 5 has an excellent ad blocking mechanism. What it doesn’t have is the ability to easily subscribe to or import some of the blacklists out on the internet, such as those used by the Adblock Plus Firefox add-on.

In order to make up for this deficit (at least partially), I downloaded the latest EasyList filter list and modified it so that it uses proper, OmniWeb-compatible, regular expressions.

The one downside with this list is that there is no way to automatically import the blacklist and whitelist files into OmniWeb. Instead, you have to edit OmniWeb’s preferences file directly to add the entries. Instructions on how to do this are included with the rest of the download.

I have no plans to continue updating this list. It’s current as of March 11, 2008. Consider it a good start for your ad filtering and update it manually as needed. I’ve included instructions on how to make your own custom file if you’re so inclined.