Recommended reading

• Control of Cables | Cocoanetics – The Devil's Horn technique for wrapping up Apple earbuds seems great, will be testing it over next few weeks.
• The coolest kindergarten ever: iPad 2s for everyone –

Recommended reading

• Inkling – Interactive textbooks for iPad. – A very slick app, definitely check it out
• Vincent D’Onofrio – I’ve always really liked D’Onofrio on Law & Order, interesting to read about his background
• Motorola Snaps Up 280 North For $20 Million – Man I’ve following these guys for ages, can’t help but think the acquisition won’t bode well for the project. Quite an interesting indicator how hot the mobile space is, espec. since Capp is well known to perform like a dog on mobile devices

Recommended reading

• Khan Academy – An amazing collection of 1200+ videos on anything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, chemistry, biology and finance
• JWB’s blog: Joel on Software – a summary: 2000 – Joel's blog is required reading for anyone in the tech sector – here's a nice slice to pique your interest

I was surprised today when attempting to confirm a flight with Ryanair that I was being told my flight details were invalid.  As usual I had copy/pasted in the details so I didn’t think there was much margin for error.

Using a web developer’s insight I guessed the validation of my reservation code contained some invisible whitespace and that this was causing the error.  Unbelievable this turned out to be the case!

Stripping whitespace from form input fields is basic, website 101 best practice stuff.  Typical users who don’t have a background in development are extremely unlikely to notice that 1 or 2 mm of space on the screen is in fact an invisible character that could cause input problems on submitted forms.  To think that all these unwitting souls will be send to paid support phone calls waiting in automatic queues for 40 minutes or more because they typed in their CORRECT reservation number is unbelievable.  But apparently Mom & Pop over at Ryanair think this is ok.

Moments later in the Ryanair checkin process I got an obscure warning in big red letters across the screen.  Maybe they use Dreamweaver to build their site?  Hold on, the warning fails to use basic English grammar correctly!

When you check-in online if you are issued a sequence number of 190 or above (located at the top right of the boarding pass). Please go to the airport check-in desk on arrival at the airport.

I actually remember in grade 4 when we were learning how to write and the teacher would often correct students for fragment sentences like these.  Have Mom & Pop even graduated from secondary school?

Recommended reading

• Is an MBA a Plus or a Minus in the Startup World? – This article argues fairly convincingly that techies can seriously benefit from doing an MBA
• Yankee Group Blog » Blog Archive » Apple’s new record: the fastest product ramp to $1 billion – After 34 years of practice, Apple has mastered the art of making a successful tech device
• http://www.sandia.gov/~sjplimp/mapreduce.html – The open source implementation of MapReduce, got a few spare machines lying around?

Read Later is an app that lets you save web pages on your iPhone/iPod for offline reading.  Not the first app to do that?  Well it’s integrated with delicious.com so any bookmarks you tag with a to_read tag (or any tag of your choice) are detected by the app and downloaded for offline reading.

And when you’re finished reading the article on your iPhone, hitting the ‘mark as read’ button sends a request to delicious and your read_later tag is removed.  Nice, simple and clean.  And currently free in the AppStore.

The articles are a pleasure to read on the iPhone.  All flashing ads, graphics and irrelevant distractions are removed for you.  You just get the cleaned text for easy reading.  The app’s description says it best:

• All web pages are cleaned and stripped of irrelevant adverts for easy reading on the iPhone.
• Store hundreds of  webpages on your iPhone
• Read Later remembers which article your were last reading
• Sync your iPhone with your Delicious account to get our latest bookmarks

Apparently there are currently 1.5m “to_read” and similar tags on delicious so there must be a lot of folks using this system to flag articles for later reading.  Check it out.