Tag Archives: technology

Google breaks the best search engine in town

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In the old days of the Internet search engine business you had a vast multitude of places to visit. There was Excite, Yahoo!, WebCrawler, Lycos, and many others. You had the search engine aggregators, such as Dogpile and HotBot.

What you didn’t have was a single source to use to search the whole of the web. When Google came along they created a way to analyze the relationships between pages to produce more useful results. The search results were no longer just a mishmash based on how many times a word existed in a page, now the results had a certain relevancy.

Then Google added advertising into the mix, providing users with a way to find products or vendors that had some correlation with the keywords entered. This was a great tool for the layperson and researcher alike. Along the way Google has added shopping results, images, news, videos, and maps. However they seem to have forgotten their core product: a clean, easy-to-use, clutter-free search engine.
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Pandora Radio on iPhone 3.1 Beta

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For those of you who are in the iPhone developer community or just are just geeky enough to pay for the developer program in order to get a sneak peek on your friends, I thought I would let you in on some information I received from Pandora concerning problems with the Pandora Radio application and the 3.1 beta.

I noticed that after updating to 3.1 Beta I was no longer able to access my Pandora Radio application.  The application would run, but eventually I would get an error screen that told me it couldn’t connect.

After trying various troubleshooting techniques on my own I e-mail Pandora support.  Mike at Pandora gave me an extended set of instructions to follow:

In particularly stubborn cases, in addition to deleting Pandora from your iPhone, you may also have to:

  1. delete Pandora from the iTunes list of Applications on your computer (it’s an option in iTunes from the list on the left, below Music)
  2. sign out of the iTunes Store (click your iTunes Store sign-in information, usually an email address, in the upper right of the screen and select ‘sign out’)
  3. re-sync your iPhone within iTunes
  4. then sign back in to the iTunes Store (again, in the upper right)
  5. re-sync your iPhone one last time

Then re-install Pandora, either via the App Store on your iPhone, or via iTunes on your computer.

After trying all of that, the application would still not talk to Pandora’s system.  I then tried the drastic step of doing a factory restore on the iPhone using the 3.1 Beta download as the firmware.  This still didn’t help much.

After reporting all of this back to Mike at Pandora, I received the following reply via e-mail:

Hi Andy,

Sorry about that. We’re aware of this issue with the app not working with the 3.1 OS and we’re hoping this is solved in our next release. Thanks so much for your patience in the meantime!

Best,
Mike @ Pandora

While this was not unexpected, given that I am running a non-production release of the OS, I was quite gratified to find out that they were aware of the issue and working on it.  There have been other times where support personnel have told users “Sorry, we can’t help you because you are running our software in a non-standard environment.” Kudos to Pandora for not reacting that way and for giving a meaningful response.

Update (2009-07-14 11:52PM EDT):

After updating to Beta 2 of OS 3.1 tonight Pandora Radio is now working again.

Moving into the cloud

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clouds

One of the current hot topics in many technology circles concerns the cloud-computing model.  Wikipedia has the following definition for cloud computing:

a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet.

One of the biggest criticisms and concerns with this approach is the ownership, integrity, and security of the data.  At work we are struggling with this concept as well.  We are investigating moving our student e-mail into either Microsoft’s or Google’s online mail model.  From an economic approach it seems very cut-and-dried.  If we move the data for our users into the cloud then we cut down on our data storage, server and basic infrastructure costs.  However, the legal ramifications of this are interesting.

Faculty and staff data are to be kept inside the enterprise due to concerns over the possibility that their mail would contain confidential or sensitive data, such as grade information, student id numbers, etc.  What is interesting is that if a student is the recipient of an e-mail from a faculty or staff member that contains this information then the confidential or sensitive data has been placed in the cloud whether or not the faculty or staff member wanted it that way.

I have been dealing with this in a small way myself while trying to decide if I should move all of my personal mail into Google (which already hosts my mail accounts using the Google Apps services).  Do I rely on the large scale backup and storage of Google?  At first I was concerned that I might loose connectivity during a rare outage of the GMail system.  But I realized that I only check my mail using a full client on my machine at home.  Everywhere else I rely on an imap connection or the web interface.  So I have made the leap!

Now to work on making my GPG signature stuff work with GMail’s web interface.

Sony needs to fix the PSN billing system

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So I just finished Prince of Persia on my PS3.  I decided that I would go and purchase the $9.99 Prince of Persia: Epilogue DLC from the PSN (PlayStation Network) store so that I could have some more PoP game time.

Turns out that I can’t purchase anything using my Bank of America debit card, because Sony’s billing and account system is seriously messed up.

First I tried just entering in my account information in the PSN store interface as a direct purchase.  I put in the card information and billing information.  I get an error back that says “Credit card is invalid. Check your entries.”  Thinking that I may have punched something in wrong when relying on my memory, I go get the physical card and verify that all the data was correct.  Hit continue.  Same error.

I then tried to just enter the billing information into the account management thinking that maybe that would work.  Same error.

I tried logging into my PSN account over the web on my laptop and entering the information there.  Same error.

Having now exhausted all the possible avenues for entering in my information, I search the Google to find out if others have had this problem and what the fix might or might not be.  Turns out there have been numerous people with the same problem.

  1. 5-page thread on PSN Forums
  2. 1-page thread on PSN Forums
  3. 1-page thread on PSN Forums

The first thread I listed had the most information.  They were discussing the possible values necessary in the address fields, etc.  I checked all my information.  Here’s what you need to double-check:

  1. Make sure your console has been activated using the System Activation item in the dashboard
  2. Make sure that if your billing address is a post office box that you are not adding in punctuation
  3. Make sure that your zip code is matching exactly with the bank records, especially if your bank uses an address verification system
  4. Make sure that your phone number, if listed, matches the bank records

The problem is that I checked all of this and none of it helped.  So I called the Sony Computer Entertainment America support number (800-345-7669) and waded through the menu system to get a support representative.  I have to give kudos to the support representative, because she was very calm and nice, and she didn’t even have a problem with the fact that I had already checked everything that she had on her checklist for me to check.

Unfortunately, she said “Sometimes the PO Box addresses just don’t work.  The only suggestion I can make is that you use a different credit card or go buy a PlayStation Network Card.”  She was very sorry that it wasn’t working, but there was nothing she could do to help.

I am not blaming the support folks, but that kind of answer is really pretty unacceptable.  I use my BoA card online, in stores, and over the phone all the time with no problems at all.  To make matters worse, when I logged in to my BoA account over the web I had a $1 pending transaction for each of my attempts to connect my card to the PSN store.  The customer service representative did assure me that they would drop off since a complete account transaction had never occured.

This is unexcusable.  Why even bother creating an online store for your game console if it doesn’t reliably work to purchase things?  Someone at Sony really needs to get this ironed out.

Apple TV cares about your FPS

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In my process of tranferring my DVD collection to a digital media server I discovered that the Apple TV software is smarter than I thought.

I have been ripping my DVD collection using Handbrake on my Mac and transferring them to a Windows box which is shared out via my internal only network to the Apple TV using iTunes.  I use the built-in Apple TV profile to do this.  The profile sets the frame rate option on the encoder to be “Same As Source”.  It turns out that if your rip has a final fps (frames per second) that is greater than 30 then the resulting movie will not be available in the list of Shared Movies on the Apple TV.