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Suprisingly even to myself, starting Saturday I am yet another iPhone owner. So far I am neutral as to how the device behaves. Some things are definitely much more advanced, and some things take a lot of time to get used to.

I do like the abundance of apps and the convenience of having them in a single location. However, it beats me as to why certain things are free (like remote desktop client for Windows), but something as simple as ssh terminal is available in paid flavors only.

According to my own sources, the jailbreak will become available pretty soon and I was encouraged to proceed as much more software is available outside of AppStore. Having a knack for changing things on my phones, I guess I will be exploring that route pretty soon too.

BTW, this blog post was typed on the iPhone and I can’t say it was all that uncomfortable.

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• Apple tries to make it right (September 6, 2007): As GigaOM writes (linking to Steve Job's statement on Apple's web site): Now there’s a way to annoy the people who have stuck by the company through thick and thin. Today, realizing that Apple’s goodwill was at risk, Jobs announced a $100 credit to all early iPhone buyers, promising to do the right thing. I see this [...]
• Travel to Chicago, again (November 19, 2007): Wednesday morning, if all goes well, I will be leaving to Chicago. I am taking two PDA phones with me, one connected through Verizon and another one through AT&T. It will be interesting to compare speeds and services on both networks outside of the New York City. I plan to watch for network flavors in [...]
• The Apple Isn’t Green (September 9, 2008): Yesterday I bought the shiny new iPhone for my girlfriend. Aside from that, I bought her an extra pair of headphones, as we figured a set lasts for about 4 months of heavy use. So instead of grabbing the ones from the original iPhone box, she went to unbox the extra set. I was [...]

As I have just figured out after some of the upgrades the external link in the title hack was, indeed, broken. In fact, I am somewhat puzzled, as it worked on some of my installations and didn’t work on others.

It turns out that the method of obtaining the permalink for the post is returning the canonical URI no matter what permalink system has been set up (I use custom on this blog). For example, even if you have something SEO-friendly, the code

$perm  = $post_id->guid;

would still return http://www.istudioweb.com/?p=427 as a link to this post. The right way of doing it now (before WP 2.7 arrives) is change the above line to:

$perm  = get_permalink($post_id);

That’s it. Should work.

P.S. Updated the downloadable txt file. Click here to view.

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• Hacking WordPress theme - External URL in title still works (September 3, 2008): At least once a week I get an e-mail about the WP theme hack I posted in January. Most of the people ask how to make the hack work in WP 2.5 and 2.6. Here's the simple answer - if you didn't touch your theme (I didn't) and if you have just upgraded the WordPress installation [...]
• Hacking WordPress theme - external URL for post title (January 12, 2008): Sometimes something weird happens - I demand something that isn't available. With software it's easy (that's how I got into computers), you dig in the code and you tweak and hack around until it does what you want. When I just started this blog on Blogger quite a while ago, there was this feature that allowed [...]
• Zoundry Blog Editor (January 15, 2008): While contemplating on my ideas of blogging editor I stumbled upon various reviews of existing blogging clients. One of them caught my eye, so I ventured ahead and downloaded Zoundry - free blogging client. I am attempting to write this post in Zoundry, version 1.0.40. Generally, I am not looking for features I came up with [...]
• WordPress 2.3 upgrade (October 30, 2007): Apparently upgrade to WP 2.3 is much more problematic then I thought. Even though I updated the test blog first (didn't see any signs of trouble), the upgrade of this one left me without much liked plugin Ultimate Tag Warrior. Hopefully the developer will release an update soon...

After Halloween long gone and other holidays coming on, I went through Google Trends to see what the trends say. Turns out - Halloween is the most important costume and party holiday. As you can see from the picture above, there is a very strong spike on each Halloween for all three words: “halloween” (blue), “costume” (orange) and “party” (red). There’s no spike on Christmas, no spike on 4th of July, no other spikes as far as I can see.

Note to entrepreneurs - it’s a good idea to set up an emergency costume delivery, or even mobile costume stores. Shouldn’t be a big problem and the higher markup is well justified. Either deliver something ordered online or set up a mobile store so that the whole block could shop.

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