Always some new scandal

In case you've been living under a rock recently there has been some hubbub over the tracking information a researcher found in some unprotected file on the iPhone.  Google and Microsoft have come out and said how they collect this data and what it is used for, Apple is taking a bit more time to answer why there is an open ended collection of location based data from where the user has been.

The trouble I have with Steve Job's "we don't track anyone" line (the same trouble I have with Google's "accidental" war driving) is that features of software don't just happen.  Someone wrote that piece of code, that piece of code was checked in and added to the test and then approved and moved into production.  Software isn't magic.

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Sleep and boning

The internet being the wide open field that it is, I was reading a Cracked article on the things I am probably doing wrong.  I typically don't click on these type of footer link spam, but serendipity is fun sometimes so I followed through to the article, and at the bottom of the first page was a link to a New York Times article on binomial sleep.  More interesting was the part about how the time of wakefulness that occurs in between the two blocks of sleep is knows for being the best time for getting it on.  The rational being that after a few hours of rest your are more focused on what you are doing and rested to boot.  Just one more damn thing in my life to change I suppose, go to bed early.

These would be nice

[?]

Robot Overlords

These bad boys are pretty scary.  Armed with rockets and hunting humans bombs.  Better than a person loosing their life to the munitions I suppose, but man this little robot will never be the adrenaline junkie from The Hurt Locker.

Sprint Hero USB Host mode

Interesting read on someones livejournal (seriously?!?)  I suppose it goes to show its not the medium, but the author that counts, but livejournal is not the place I would have thought to have a technical discussion about kernel patching for android. 

If its over your head it wasn't for you, I mostly wanted to have a bookmark of sorts to find it again later.

Google Groups link

XDA link

Syncing Itunes VS itunes portable

I've written a few times about the idea of making itunes portable 1, 2, the idea keeps circling my brain even if I don't know that you can pull it off and distribute your results. 

For PC's and Mac's that you have the ability to install itunes on a different option to the Portable iTunes may be to use a piece of software called MediaRover.  This would allow you to at least keep all of your PC's up to date with the latest library information.   This is obviously not ideal given that you are adding information to all the hard drives of the computers that you choose to make use of this software, but it may help some people with a different problem.

Lifehacker has a quick write up on the software for those interested.

Adobe you son of a bitch worthless fucking software company

So I updated my flash player on firefox and in addition to having to install that getplus plugin rather than being able to directly install the damn plugin, I get the New York Times Reader installed.  Fuck you Adobe, you don't get to install more programs on my pc.  Best part for me, no opt out.

Absolute bullshit, I am going to be adding your Times Reader to our corporate blocklist, auto quarantine.  I think it is beyond lame that iTunes wants to install bonjour and Safari, by default on updates, but thus far neither of those has been known to completely compromise systems.  Adobe your software has and continues to be the weak link in the web chain as far as vulnerabilities are concerned.  You