When everyone first tries out the paperless ticket on their mobile device, they have a paper copy in their pocket just in case. Of course, Murphy Law doesn’t come into effect until you don’t have that backup. So do you need to print a paper copy every time? Of course not, but you should have a backup. Here are the two that matter most:

• You can just leave some extra time. If you have a problem, you can always go back to the Kiosk or ticket counter and print out a paper boarding pass. If you use this one, you probably didn’t need the paperless boarding pass anyways and are just doing it to try something new.
• The real backup plan is to access your boarding pass online, have the boarding pass on your mobile device, and take a screen shot into your photo album. You can now bring it up at anytime you need it. To do this on an iPhone, you press both the power button at the top and the home button on the front at the same time and snap you are done.

Why would you need this backup? Two examples that actually happened to me. They both are caused by how Safari works on the iPhone. Similar things may happen on other phones, but I don’t know. When you switch applications, like reading your email in the security line, it may need to free up memory and drop the saved version of the page. When you access it again — when you are about to get to the TSA agent checking IDs — Safari will reload the page and you will be all set. Except if…

…the network isn’t available right then. Would never happen on AT&T at a busy airport, right? Happened to me last week at PHL.

…you are inside the 30 minute time window for getting boarding passes. I don’t think this will happen again, but in the early days with Continental, this did happen to me. As I got out of the cab 35 minutes before my flight, I had a boarding pass on my screen. At 25 minutes before my flight the page tried to refresh and it said. It wouldn’t do it within 30 minutes. A fast sprint to the ticket counter and a sprint back got me on my flight, but it wasn’t pretty.

Oh, and remember, you need it to get on your plane also, so your plan to “have it on the screen and not check my email or anything” may get you through security, but I guarantee Murphy will have your phone ring right before they start boarding your Zone.

Remember…just snap a screen shot and you’ll have a backup. Safe Travels.

I heard the word used in reference to economic theory. While it is a mouthful, this variation or cycle notion comes up so much, it should be used more.

This year was going to be about speed, no real theme, Son #2 just wanted the fastest car.  That was the plan.  Plans change.  While at SeaWorld in San Diego, he saw Shamu and decided he wanted a theme.  Shamu, the killer whale.

Getting a block of wood to turn into an Orca seemed daunting, but we took a run at it.  Will traced a picture onto a template and transferred the template to the block of wood.  We usually just hack at the wood with a compound mitre saw and a RotoZip, both let the boys do it, but with my hand involved guiding.  For this curvy whale, we borrowed a table scroll saw.  It worked great, and its slow cutting speed meant the 3rd grader could actually do most of the cutting solo (while I shot video).

The curves were in, but we needed a dorsal fin.  While we could have cut some wood, I decided to try something I bought a few months ago… ShapeLock.  It worked great.  Heat up some water, drop the plastic beads in until they are clear then I simply pressed it into shape.  I used a circular glass spoon rest we have and shaped the backside with a knife.  The bonus came by embedding a bend paperclip so it had a pin at the bottom to stick it into the wood Orca.

A little paint job and he is ready to race.

GMail has a nice feature where you can take your username and add “+xyzzy” and you will still get the note.  With this extra information, you can apply filters, rules, etc.  When I signup for sites that I’m not sure won’t just turn into a SPAM source, I add “+siteabbreviation” so if I get too many postings, I can learn the source.

I used to do the same thing in the physical postal world.  I would add a second address line that was a mail stop.  Something like “MS: 341A.”  I had a list of these I kept.  It let me track who was sharing or selling my contact info and has occasionally been interesting.

But there is a problem.  Not every web developer out there knows what the valid characters are for email addresses.  They write code that doesn’t allow this.  When it happens at registration, I get annoyed, but then move on (usually using an email account I use less).

Today I’m annoyed and the problem will persist.  Papa John’s let me sign up with the “name+papajohns@gmail.com” but their email unsubscribe system doesn’t let it work.  It won’t match the unsubscribe link to my email address.  My solution? Train my mail server/client that Papa Johns email is SPAM.  Not ideal, but I have choice in my pizza provider and this is a big deal for me.

Note: this is about SMTP addresses, other mail systems had/have different notations, but since SMTP is how email flows on the Internet, that is all that really matters.  You can read more on Wikipedia’s email address entry.

The answer is that I read from the top down. Since tweets and other items tend to build on each other, you want to read the oldest first, then build up to the most recent. Given this “I’ll read them all in order” approach, my eyes can just flow straight down if the oldest is at the top and the most recent is at the bottom.

Otherwise my eyes have to read the bottom item (moving a small amount down) then jump up tho the next item and read a little down, then jump up. I keep doing this for a long time.

Newest at the bottom solves this problem.

When I realized my home directory had almost 200GB, I had to figure it out. 3 minutes later, I found that ~/Library/Application Support/SyncServices/Local/save.isyncplayback was close to 180GB…bingo, there is it.

A quick Google and some link following had me to the Apple Forum topic: Save.isyncplayback folder eating my hard drive in no time. A few months ago, I had been trying to figure out a Plaxo/iCal sync oddness and must have turned on verbose debugging. Turned it off and cleared the history… I’m a happy camper again with plenty of disk space.

Make it a simple process. Take every line item, have everyone fill out a yes/no check list. Anything that gets enough checks stays in, everything else leaves the initial bill and get a chance at round 2 in a month.

Why Democracies Fail…: “What won’t work is strong arming conservatives in the name of faux compromise with legislation filled with broken window spending, pork barrel projects and political grand standing. If it’s such an urgency, we should be cutting every debatable program to get something out the door. If the majority party were really interested in bi-partisanship instead of earning a political win, this would have been done already. “

(Via alexrudloff.com.)

A neighbor I respect a lot says that a big part of the financial crisis is that nobody (especially the banks and financial firms, but even other potential players in the mix) are not doing anything because they don’t want to act until they know what the government will do. Why write off or sell your bad assets for $1 if the gov’t might pay $3 (or even $10). In this view, definitive action is needed, but people would have to believe it would be stuck to (which kinda nullifies my “second round” in the first part here).

Tibco hardware appliance tackles rising messaging volume: “Tibco started a beta programme last summer and McNamara said that one of the beta triallists already had one installed. He added that he expected that most users would lease the products, although he was reluctant to discuss pricing on the appliance.”

(Via InfoWorld.)

I do find the whole topic of appliances in IT interesting. I’ve seen it change the way things are approved, procured, charged back (or not). It is a balance between general purpose vs. purpose built, with some gray on each side.

On the iPhone side, we’ve got updates to Radioshift Touch in
development. Better yet, we’re hoping to shipping Airfoil Speakers
for iPhone in the next month or two. This will make it possible to
receive audio on the iPhone (and iPod Touch) via wifi, just as
Airfoil Speakers for Mac, Windows, and Linux already do! Keep your
eyes on our site and the App Storefor information on both these new
applications.

This is just what I need. There are many times during the week that I’m on conference calls. Too many of them have me in “listen mode” where I’m supposed to be learning something. Being shackled to my desk during these times can be tough, especially since many of them are during lunch time.

I can have phone calls go through my Mac at home. So to solve this, I sometimes turn on Airfoil and use AppleTV as a remote speaker on the TV within earshot of the kitchen to broadcast the call while I make lunch.

This is suboptimal because I need to turn the TV on beforehand, and it means the TV is blasting. Ok if I’m home alone, but if anyone else is in the house, it doesn’t work.

Airfoil speakers on the iPhone/Touch will be perfect. I’ll have portable speakers and be able to turn it on and off right next to me. Looking forward to this small improvement.

While I am comfortable on the command line, I live in a GUI, so I wanted some tools to help me learn, use, and manage it all. So I’m looking for a graphical subversion client. So far, I’ve been playing with these:

Versions.

Platform: A Mac OS X application. While I use Windows and Linux also, so much of my “SVN related” time will be Mac OS X that this is actually a plus.

Pros: Mac OS X native and very nice looking.

Cons: No built in editor (or viewer). It would be nice to have a “quick look” function that assumed a plain text file if it didn’t know the extension. There is support for the Mac OS X quick look facility, but it doesn’t work with enough artifacts given odd file names used for config and other text oriented files in the stuff I’m working with. The assumption that you edit in an app specifically designed for the file type is ok, but sometimes not appropriate or worth the effort for a small change.

Synchro SVN.

Platform: A cross platform application that works fine on Mac OS X.

Cost: Normally $99, but currently $59. If I read it right, I, as a single user, can put it on the various computers I use (desktop and two laptops, including the one Windows laptop I sometimes use).

Pros: Built in editor that is sufficient for quick changes. Cross platform could be handy. Revision graph could help make sense of the lineage of versions and branches.

Cons: Being cross platform, it isn’t very pretty to look at.

Cornerstone.

Platform: Mac OS X

Cost: $69. I, as a single user, can put it on two computers (which is probably ok since I normally use one iMac and one MacBook)

Pros: Mac OS X native and looks good. Has most features I can think of using. Built in quick revision comparison is very simple, quick and useful.

Cons: A built in editor would be nice, but there are a lot of built in “quick view” options, both leveraging the OS “quick look” function as well as a built in text viewing feature in the main app window (“Toggle Contents”) which worked very well for my needs.

Decision. I’ll decide in the next week. Right now I’m torn between Cornerstone and Versions. If Cornerstone was a little less I’d pull the trigger. May end up there anyways because of the built in previews (or diff and contents).

There are a slew of other clients available. A table listing and comparing can be found on Wikipedia.