Today, I setup a couple of WordPress plugins for automatically posting blog links to Facebook and Twitter.

WP to Twitter

The first is WP to Twitter.  Instructions are pretty straightforward for creating a Twitter app for integration.  Small hitch was that after creating my Access Token I had to reload the page in order for the access tokens to actually show up.  Now whenever I create a new post, it will post a Tweet using my Twitter account with a link back to my post.  Bit.ly integration is supported, WP tags are converted to Twitter hashtags and there are a few other options as well.

Add Link to Facebook

The second plugin is Add Link to Facebook.  The name of this one is somewhat of a misnomer because it does way more than just add links.  It appears to integrate blog comments and Facebook comments as well as a host of other features.  For now, I’m only planning on using it to post links, but I will probably explore some of the other features later on.

Setup for this one was a bit more complicated.  The plugin page has a setup guide as well as an FAQ.  When attempting to authorize the application within the WP setup, I kept getting a redirect_uri error on setup end eventually ended up deleting the plugin, deleting the Facebook app I had created and starting from scratch a second time.  The second time through creating the Facebook app I caught a message that said the app had been created, but could take “several minutes” to replicate across their servers.

I decided to wait for awhile.  After 15 minutes or so, I was still receiving the error, so I went to play Legend of Zelda for awhile, and tried again an hour or so later.  This time, it went to Facebook and authorized just fine, and now I’m just playing with different settings.

Step 2: Drop on tile floor to shatter screen

Step 2a: Sweep up shards of glass off the floor

Step 3: Call AppleCare and find out that it’s not covered under warranty since it was broken through “negligence”.

Step 4: Decide that Apple’s out of warranty repair option ($300) is too expensive to fix a device that costs $500 brand new.

Step 5: Purchase 3rd party touch screen digitizer replacement

Step 6: Spend your Saturday afternoon with a heat gun and a tiny plastic crowbar to prying out thousands of tiny shards of glass.

Step 7: Plug in new replacement screen

Step 8: Test new replacement screen and find out that only 30% of the screen is responsive to touch

Step 9: Recognize that you’re beyond your area of expertise

Step 10: Decide that maybe the $300 repair option might be your best remaining option

Step 11: Call AppleCare again and find out that the $300 repair option actually includes a replacement if they can’t fix it, and that an Apple Store will actually just swap you straight across for a new one, even though you already tried to fix it yourself

Step 12: Decide that the AppleStore is too far away and opt for the UPS shipping option

Step 13: Ship it back to Apple

Step 14: Get an email from Apple that says they’ve determined that they won’t actually fix it or replace it after all (no word about the $300 that you spent for them to fix it)

Step 15: Have a long and frustrating conversation with AppleCare and find out that they won’t actually replace or repair anything unless every shard of the original glass is still in its original place

Step 16: Wait for your $500 lump of junk to come from Apple since they generously ship the unfixed iPad back to you

And that is how you turn your iPad2 into a $500 lump of junk.

I didn’t know what hyper-threading was, but I’d bought the hype that quad-core processors with 8 logical cores were spectacular.  As it turns out, they are, but now I know why.

Logical cores aren’t as powerful as physical cores, if you could squeeze 8 physical cores on a die, that would be better than 8 logicals, but until somebody figures out how to do that, I’ll stick with the logical ones.

Hyper threading just means that two processes can be operating on a single processor, though still not at the same time, which is why physical cores are better.  Hyperthreading just means that if one thread gets stuck waiting for something, and another thread is ready to go, the first one pauses to let the other one go past.  Kind of like a cargo train pulling onto a side-track so the bullet train can go past.

Click through to see a chart illustrating all the currently ongoing lawsuits.  This is the second chart I’ve seen like this, but this one is easier to read.  It shows the relationships between all the companies suing each other over patents related to mobile devices.  Direction of the arrow indicates who is suing and who’s being sued.

Nokia seems to be the hub, followed by Apple.  Nokia is suing everyone (and their dog) while Apple is being sued by everyone (and their dog).  Surprisingly Kodak seems to be overly litigious and conspicuously absent from everything is Palm (now HP) who has yet to sue or be sued by anyone at all.

So yes, this pleases me.  I’ve noted before that I love the idea of net neutrality, but I’m not willing to let the government regulate one more aspect of my life in order to make it a reality.  Apparently the nation agrees with me.

I do, however, find it funny that things like this can sway elections and public opinion, when you read the details and find out the the poll was based on 800 people.  That’s 0.00026% of the population if you were wondering.

There’s an process on Mac computers called ‘mds’ that shows up in Activity Monitor if you’re looking.  That process is Spotlight indexing your computer and it can sometimes use up quite a bit of CPU.

I’m saving this article for myself so that I can fix the issue if it gets too bad on my machine.

They also announced that they’re going to publish official app review guidelines so that developers will have a much better idea of whether they’re app will pass the review process or not.

Both are smart moves.  They’ll benefit the development community and, by extension, the platform in general.  I’d like to think that they listened to their developers and that the FTC investigation had nothing to do with it, but the announcement is mum on that particular subject.

Apple relaxes restrictions on iOS app code, iAd analytics.

I’m going to go ahead and say it.  I’m against Net Neutrality.

I love the concept.  I’d love all content to have equal access to internet pipes, but I don’t want that to be enforced by laws and a governmental morass of regulation and legislation.

If you can achieve the same thing through a gentlemen’s agreement, then it’ll be a thing of beauty, but I think this is one thing the government shouldn’t have their hands in (there are others, but let’s stay on topic).

Just because I don’t like something doesn’t mean I should go crying to the government in to solve the problem.  When I was a kid we had a word for people that always appealed to a higher authority when facing a problem.  We called them tattle-tales.

Not that there is anything inherently wrong with making money (I like to do that myself), but it does have an impact on how Facebook runs, and you should be aware of the ramifications.  Facebook was initially built on the foundation of privacy and a small group of your friends.  Overtime as the number of users grew, Facebook realized the power of what they’d built (they are now the most visited website on the Internet), they began to leverage their size in ways that required people’s profile information and activity to be more public.  If you haven’t looked at your privacy settings lately, you’re probably sharing with a much larger crowd than you anticipated.  See here for a vivid little demonstration of how Facebook has become more public over time.

Example #1

Every time you update your status, the contents are piped straight to all the major search engines, where search engines do what they do best: they index it and make it findable for anyone who types in related keywords.  In other words, the whole world can see what you write on Facebook, unless you’ve explicitly set your privacy settings to disallow this.  Explicit is the key word here, you can control all these settings, but now you have to set them manually to keep your information private, whereas before it was the default setting.

Example #2

You know all that information you put into your public profile?  Your name, hometown, likes, interests, musical preferences, favorite movies, favorite TV shows, etc?  Yeah, all that information is used to construct a demographic picture of you so that Facebook can target advertisements to you (I’m fine with that), but if you’re signed into Facebook and visit another site while still signed in, that site can also potentially see all the information in your profile.  This allows the site to personalize it’s interface to you which is powerful and actually pretty neat, but it allows a lot of other things to, and you should consciously be making the decision about whether the risk is worth the reward.

What’s Happening?

Keep in mind this is serious enough stuff that members of the US Senate are writing letters to Facebook’s leadership warning that the FTC may get involved if certain concerns aren’t addressed satisfactorily.

So for those who don’t follow tech news, if you don’t know what I mean when I talk about the Open Graph API or Instant Personalization (these are both Facebook “features”), I’ll almost gaurantee that you are sharing much more publicly than you thought you were.  Maybe that’s OK with you, but you should be aware of what you’re doing.  “Knowledge is power” and all that.

So What?

I’m not advocating a Facebook boycott like many in the tech world are doing.  Facebook provides a valuable service that I enjoy.  I am, however, advocating that you know the cost of the service that Facebook provides, even though that cost is not measured in dollars.

If you decide that you don’t want to share your details with the world and the rest of the web, Business Insider put together a handy little guide for putting Facebook on a “Privacy Lockdown”.  The guide will tell you to put everything to “Only Friends”.  You can choose your on level of comfort, I have most of mine set at “Friends of Friends”.