Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

Of the last 40 updates I’ve made to my Facebook Application for showing Stock Quotes, 6 have failed with a “Unknown data store API error.” While I have no idea what the error means, it seems to indicate that Facebook couldn’t save the data I sent it at a 15% rate for that period of 10 hours.

Other Facebook Platform issues include restricted growth, bugs in the developer application, downtime, and poor performance. Obviously, F8 will go through some growing pains before it fully matures.

My cron-jobs are spamming me, as I just got home to at least a thousand emails from the cron daemon alone:

I also have 35,000 emails in my Thunderbird which are notifications of new comments on various blogs which I will be deleting ASAP. Even a Mozilla product starts to get slow after too much data. How do you guys deal with all the automatic email-spam these days? I filter it to different places, of course, but it still builds up over time.

Live from the Honolulu International Airport, I bring you the following conversation I shared with the Transport Security Administration about the photography of their checkpoint.

Me: Is there any specific written tsa regulation prohibiting photography?

TSA Captain: Yes there is. Phography is not allowed.

Me: Can I see this in writing?

TSA Captain: I can’t let you see that.

Me: Then how do I know it exists?

TSA Captain: I just told you.

Obviously there is a problem here; I don’t mind not being able to take photos (national security, yada yada) but TSA as a government agency has to at least inform the public of its regulations. How can anyone be held responsible for violating a regulation they could not possibly know exists.

I want to blog about how my cancelled flight on nwa is making me five hours late, but all I have is my bb.

Wordpress should definitely release a mobile skin for the admin area, which doesn’t work so well right now on small screens.

Yes, you’ve all read the amazing iPhone battery life news, but do any of you really believe it? According to Apple Gazette, they claim:

iPhone now will feature up to 8 hours of talk time, 6 hours of Internet use, 7 hours of video playback or 24 hours of audio playback. In addition, iPhone will feature up to 250 hours—more than 10 days—of standby time.

Checking out the cNet mobile phone battery life charts, the averages are between 3-6 hours of talk time, which is way more reasonable. 10 days of standby? My big sony laptop with massive power cells can’t even hibernate that long. Companies shouldn’t be allowed to make performance claims without independent certification. Then again, if Apple is lying–and I think they are grossly overstating the iPhone’s capabilities–there’s plenty of chance for a class action lawsuit around some kind of consumer fraud or false advertising claim.

Even still, everyone’s holding their breath for the next to get their hands on these. We won’t see a backlash until there’s decent market saturation and enough time for people to get over the initial “wow,” but believe my, it’s coming. The iPhone is too hyped to do anything but disappoint.