Somah's Blog

VIDEO: Keith Olbermann on Palin's Terrorist Ties

Keith Olbermann of MSNBC calling Palin out on her own domestic terrorist ties. It's 11 minutes you need to watch.

The Mavericks Pallin' Around With The Ku Klux Klan

OK, I won't stoop to their level of absurd exaggeration, but their supporters seem to be ready to "lynch" Obama. At his recent rally, John McCain asks a crowd of his supporters, "who is the real Barack Obama?" A question to which one of his supporters yells, "terrorist!" What does McCain do to such an alarming attack on a presidential candidate? Nothing.

Also, when Sarah Pitbull launched her pathetic attempt to tie Obama, a black man with an Arabic middle name, to terrorists, one of her supporters yelled, "kill him." Her reaction? No reaction.

This is a woman that belonged to The Alaskan Independence Party, a successionist party which she addressed earlier this year. Keith Olbermann of MSNBC exposes her once and for all.

So when Sarah says, "Country First," she must be thinking, "dog-garn it! That country shoulda been Alaska!"

iPhone Apps: The Great, The OK and The WTF!

I love my iPhone and even though I haven't upgraded to the 3G one yet, I've been enjoying all its applications with very complaints about the speed. I've downloaded plenty of applications since June. Some were free and some cost money (in case of OmniFocus, a lot of money) so I wanted to share with you rmy experience with each of these apps. I devided them into three categories and I'll start with the most impressive:

The Great

1. Facebook (Free): Seriously, hadn't not been for this app, my FB account, which I created back in 2005, would have probably still been stale. Version 2.0 is full-featured and just amazing!
2. Pandora Radio (Free): Listen to Internet radio customized to your taste on your iPhone even on the Edge network. This app is a full-featured Pandora application. It rarely lags, and the sound is superb. I love it!
3. Shazam (Free): It's impressive on how it finds the song you're listening to (even in a loud bar) and list it for you allowing you to buy it directly from iTunes. So far, it hasn't let me down once! :D
4. Stanza (Free): Always have reading material handy. This app offers hundreds of classic and popular books for free!
5. Obama '08 (Free): The entire campaign putting the iPhone powers to work for YOU! Find out who from your contacts live in a battleground state and call them, find out how you can help out in your area, sign up for campaign updates, check news and local events in real time, view Obama's YouTube channel and learn about Obama's stance on all the issues. Now that's innovation.
6. Urbanspoon (Free): Find the restaurants nearby that are within your budget and cuisine inclination.
7. Exposure (Free): The first version was bad, but they improved it. I now browse Flickr using this app :-)
8. CraigsMobileList ($2.99): It's Craig's List for your iPhone. It's great :)
9. Labyrinth Lite (Free): The classic labyrinth game taking full advantage of the iPhone's Accelerometer. It's too perfect!
10. Twitterrific (Free): Using Twitter on the iPhone. You send tweets and reply to them as well.
11. Summizer ($4.99): Follow the hot topics on Twitter. Put in the tag you're interested in and voila! I used it a lot during the debates to gauge people's reactions :-)
12. iWik ($0.99): Wikipedia optimized for the iPhone. It's incredible!

The OK

1. Showtimes (Free): Not too innovative but I still like it :-)
2. QuickVoice Recorder ($2.99): Great for recording sessions. Drains the battery, though :(
3. CalorieCheck ($0.99): Slow and not very accurate.
4. AIM (Free): Being on IM is fun, but still slow.
5. TypePad (Free): It's very limited and doesn't alert Facebook on publishing a new post. There's an apparent disconnect between the iPhone and online prodcuts.
6. Loopt (Free): I find myself never using it, but the concept is cool.
7. Scrabble ($9.99): Slow and the dictionary is limited, but still fun.
8. AP Mobile News Network (Free): News from the AP. Local news is horrid.
9. Google Mobile (Free): I hardly use it :(
10. Weight Tracker (Free): The implementation is lacking. I used it for a week and then stopped tracking!
11. Pocketpedia (Free): Keep track of your media library. Know who has your Ghost dvd and how long you had it for.
12. LocalEats ($0.99): Find the best of restaurants in every category. Make sure your city is listed before you buy it. It's good, but I prefer Urbanspoon.

The WTF

1. OmniFocus ($19.99): This is a scam! I gave it a shot for a week but then I felt stupid for paying $20 over this. A major disappointment in the Omni brand :(
2. Weight-Charter ($4.99): Buggy and not very intuitive. What a waste of money!
3. BlocksClassic (Free): Not very smooth. Lost my interest pretty quickly
4. BlackBook Guides (Free): Again, limited cities with information I don't find myself using on daily baisis.
5. WhosHere (Free): Slow, unreliable and useless!
6. gFlash+ (Free): Too pedantic!
7. A Personal Assistant (Free): Consolidating access to all your account, including banks, in one app controlled by a startup ... thanks, but no thanks!

I noticed that most outstanding applications are free. So I guess the lesson I learned here is to think twice before actually buying an iPhone application that costs more than $0.99. Too often, it'll turn out to be a wast of money ... and iPhone disk space.

Abstract Layer for JavaScript Libraries

With all the many helpful Javascript libraries out there (YUI, Dojo, jQuery, Prototype, MooTools, ...etc), does it make sense to write an abstraction layer that allows developers to switch from one library to another without changing their code?

Abstraction layers and wrappers of this sort have proven very successful in hiding differences between database client libraries (i.e. specific implementations) by introducing one, clean and consistent interface to developers. It allows them to switch from one database to another with very little overhead and code change.

Providing an abstraction layer for developers would empower them to decouple their code from the direct implementation of these Javascript libraries. This is a big gain especially when a decision is made to switch from one library to another for whatever reason.

All the aforementioned libraries handle the following:

• Dom manipulation
• Event management
• Ajax management
• Element manipulation
• User Agent awerness
• Object extension
• Drag and Drop

I think I might just give it a shot :-) I'll keep you posted.