Today the NYTimes had some amazing new aerial photos of the World Trade Center collapse. I’m not quite sure where they came from (no I didn’t read the article) but the images are spectacular! I suggest you go take a look for yourself.
Blackberry Desktop Manager Sync Error Fix
January 14th, 2010 § 0
An issue that I’ve met head on a few times since getting my Blackberry is I’m randomly greeted with a sync error. It’s an error that’s sort of crushing to see, that and it usually screws up whatever it’s trying to sync. Today I did some searching after my contact list went missing and came across a post over at VoIP Tech Chat where they went over a couple of fixes and I’m now going to go over what fixed it for me.
First I was greeted with this:
Where proceeded to try to retry a couple of times before getting frustrated and started googling. I came across their post where they outlined a couple of fixes that all circled around Mac OS X’s Sync Manager. The last fix on the page was one that seemed promising (that or I’m biased towards terminal based fixes). I opened up terminal and ran the command below:
/System/Library/Frameworks/SyncServices.framework/Versions/A/Resources/resetsync.pl reset
First I ran this with Blackberry Desktop Manager closed and then again with it running. Both times it told me that there were no matching processes but if you watch a list, say the list of calendars it will clear out and re-populate after running the command. Hope this helps!
In 2010 I Will…
January 2nd, 2010 § 1
Temporary Twitter Accounts
December 3rd, 2009 § 5
The other day while heading to class on the T I had a thought. Why doesn’t Twitter offer temporary accounts? For example, you have an event that you’re promoting via Twitter and once the event is done you don’t plan on ever touching the account again. Why not have a process to automatically remove these accounts? In comes a temporary Twitter account.
Ideally you would be able to create an account and set an end date on which the account would expire. For example if your event is December 11th you could set the account to expire December 15th so that you can see reactions and respond to them appropriately. On the expiration date the account no longer allows anyone to log in and if a user attempts to visit the account directly it will display a page letting the user know that the account was only temporary and has queued for deletion. Additionally at the same time the account becomes inactive it will tweet on last time so that everyone following the account will have been notified in some fashion, at this time the account will be removed from the following list of any followers for the account. After a waiting period, say 60 days, the account no longer displays a warning message to users and is returned to the pool of available names. This would allow for a wide variety of temporary events to interact while not wasting usernames, often times useful ones.
Let me know what you think of my idea in the comments.
Creative Advertising is Awesome
November 19th, 2009 § 2
Coming from a small town I never really got to see a whole lot of this awesome advertising that I’d see and read about via Twitter and other social media outlets. When I moved to Boston for school I knew that’d change, after all this is the city that’s famous for (justifiably) panicking over Aqua Teen Hunger Force’s prank. Today I finally got my first taste of some truly awesome advertising. As I walked into the George Sherman Union here at BU there was an odd bald man standing and staring out the door, strange but I continued to Starbucks. On my way I noticed about half a dozen other bald men standing just staring straight ahead. As I walked towards Starbucks one leapt forward, handed me a small bottle of Tabasco Sauce and told me that Fox’s Fringe was on tonight at 9pm. I certainly wish I were going to be around to see how Tabasco Sauce and lots of bald men have anything to do with the show.
All in all I was just excited to see some sort of fun advertising, and at least for me it was certainly an effective tactic.
Facebook is Pathetic
October 26th, 2009 § 0
I’ve been on Facebook since it was first opened to high school students, when it was still very basic. It was great, it was fast and much easier on the eyes than it’s dreaded counterpart Myspace. Then it became insanely popular and started to slow down, I understand that happening but it’s been in the news and publicized insane amounts over the past couple of years and it’s number of users has jumped through the roof. Granted I do not fully understand backend development on a site the size of Facebook but regardless, I find it a little pathetic that after all this publicity, money, and users that they still can’t manage to have uptime more than 1/4 (if even) of the time that I try to log on. For any other company on the net this would be inexcusable (look at Gmail’s recent outage and the ensuing outrage) but for Facebook it’s ok? Why?
Facebook’s development is great but to me it seems as though they’re moving too fast for their servers (or even users sometimes) to handle. They open the site to developers, great, but now it’s even slower and more annoying with all these applications. They open up their login to developers, great, but now if you try to use it you just have to pray that at that particular moment the site is responding and you don’t get stuck half logged in with a fancy little lightbox that you can’t get out of stuck over the site.
Today I pose one question and a possibly simpler answer. Why is Facebook able to get away with their terrible uptime/availability? My solution: Slow down. Stop trying to do everything at once, make sure the backend can support these ridiculous things.
I keep thinking that they might get on top of things and every time I do they swamp themselves with another release of the news feed or something of the like. I feel as though this is just irresponsible development and quite frankly, pathetic. I’m just waiting to pounce on the next big social network to get away from this horrid thing.
Sound Sculpture
October 20th, 2009 § 0
This is a pretty awesome video that I just came across thanks to GOOD. I had never actually heard of a sound sculpture before seeing this but it’s a pretty cool concept and the video is absolutely amazing, I’ve got a deep respect for Daniel Franke, the creator and his efforts. Take a look:
One Minute Soundsculpture from Daniel Franke on Vimeo.
Notice the detail in this, the reflection on the floor, the lack of movement as the camera moves around and shakes. I’m simply in awe and would love to know a little more about this.
New Portfolio Live!
October 1st, 2009 § 0
I’ve been trying to get around to creating a new portfolio for a long time now and I’ve just launched my new portfolio at http://portfolio.jamisonkissh.com. I attempted to keep the minimalist look of my blog that I adore but I’m not sure if I succeeded, please let me know what you think!
Holy Swine Flu!
October 1st, 2009 § 3
Today I was taking a look at the Republican American and local news to see what was going on back in my home state and I was simply amazed by the number of H1N1 stories in the news section. Take a look at the screen shot below for today…
Twitter Returns a 403
September 14th, 2009 § 0
So where else am I supposed to turn when Twitter is returning a 403 error? My blog of course. Just tried to go to the actual Twitter website and was presented with this screen
I just found is strange that they let the server return it’s own error message than one of their usual fail whale messages.