Aetheric Research, Ltd.

Judging from the search terms I’ve seen coming in, the information that people want is:

1.  How do I make it happen if it’s not connecting to the authentication server properly?

Attach to a wireless access point and go to https://quickaccess.verizonwireless.com (or to the string found in your modem status).  Make sure that your 3g connection is enabled, as the scripts there require certain things from the modem that they can only pull when it’s enabled.

2. Modem status?  Wat?

Hit ctrl-alt-t to get a terminal.  Type: modem status

This will get you a bunch of information, most of which is irrelevant unless you’re troubleshooting a specific problem.  The lines you’ll be interested in are the MEID (if you’re trying to activate over the phone) and your payment_url (which is going to be the quickaccess one mentioned above, with some additional information after it–use that if generic quickaccess doesn’t work)

Enjoy!

Running software development projects ‘in the cloud’ has several barriers that traditional development projects do not face.  First, regardless of the project, you’ll need someplace to keep the files when you’re not working on them; most “cloud storage” currently is biased towards either backups or towards documents; obtaining a URI to work with a project from one cloud on a service hosted in another cloud is rather like pulling teeth.  This barrier can be overcome with some careful work (or a solution that I’m currently developing), but in the meantime, ShiftEdit has some useful features.

ShiftEdit is a PHP editor with the typical syntactical highlighting, automatic indenting, and paren-completion that developers have come to expect from traditional IDEs.  It has a clean interface and works well enough on the CR-48 to be worth using.  Most critically, beyond the FTP retrieval of object files that other competitor products provide, ShiftEdit allows for SFTP and SVN.  

The SFTP access can be leveraged to obtain files from any server that you have SSH access to; read/write may be a little slow (depending on the server) but it works well enough.  The SVN access does not yet support SVN+SSH, but the developer assures me that this capability is in the works.

ShiftEdit is still very much in active development; the developer takes the time to respond to queries about the status of the project and to trace down any errors that may occur.  

Things I like: clean, useful interface; built-in versioning; under active development

Things I dislike: not enough documentation

Things I would change: adding SSH+SVN, perhaps adding a little storage on the server for small projects

Edit:  Ok, make that VERY active development.  It looks like SSH+SVN was added while I wasn’t looking.  Even more recommended now. :-)

It is perhaps a testament to the orderly and efficient working of the adblock extension that I only just noticed that I had not yet reviewed it.  Sitting quietly in a button up in the corner, Chrome Adblock filters out advertisements across the web quietly and efficiently.

The Adblock extension comes with a fairly useful set of configuration tools.  You can whitelist domains that you wish to support on the third tab of the settings page; you can select your preferred block lists on the second page; and on the first page you have the option to show google text ads–to be encouraged, given that they’re unobtrusive and not annoying–and to block ads within youtube videos.

This last is not fully functional-yet-but as the extension is under active development, that should move out of ‘beta’ status within a few versions.

Whitelisting is easy to accomplish; there’s the option to put in the filter by hand, using the same format as the popular firefox adblocker, as well as a ‘wizard’ interface to automatically generate the rules for individual domains or subdomains.  

Blacklist lists, on the second tab, are easily managed as well; a series of checkboxes allows them to be selected individually, and a button is provided to select all of them at once.  

The only other feature of note is an optional context menu entry, allowing specific blocking of an ad, of all ads on a site, or whitelisting of a site.  

All in all, this extension works quietly and effectively, and is nearly invisible to the user after some small initial setup.  It provides the option to enable ads for sites you wish to support quickly and easily while blocking most of the known annoyances, “weird old tip” or otherwise.  

Things I like:  It works, it’s unobtrusive, and it’s easy to set up and ignore.

Things I dislike:  It does not yet make toast.

Things I would change:  Frankly…nothing.  It does exactly what I asked for.  Send this guy a donation; he’s doing it right.

The history of the popup ad is fairly long, as far as the web goes, and closely mirrors the adoption of Javascript, which made them possible.  Given the extremely vocal nature of the objections to that sort of advertisement displayed by savvy web users, and given the nature of the Chrome browser as relying heavily on the use of Javascript in order to ensure consistent user experience, Google has wisely decided to ensure that most popups are blocked.

However, given that apparently some people must still actually click on the accursed things, it’s been in the best interest of marketing firms to innovate even more intrusive forms of advertising.  Adblock catches some of them, but there are still occasional popups that do show up; further, there are occasional legitimate uses of popup windows–for various application forms, or for opening video in a new window.

The “Better Pop Up Blocker” addresses these problems.  It sits resident in the omnibar, and when popup javascript is intercepted, it flashes–if the user wishes to open the popup, they can click the icon and receive a list of currently blocked popups, as well as the option to whitelist the domain or to temporarily turn off popup blocking.  

Opening the options for the plugin reveals some interesting other functions–besides the usual popup blocking methods, there’s methods to prevent some of the dirtier tricks (such as popups that spawn after you leave the page, or certain creative uses of otherwise legitimate functions) that the user can enable.  There’s also the ability to disable text selection intercept–one of the more annoying tricks used by some webpages with no respect for fair use to prevent any copying of their text.

Better Pop Up Blocker is better than stock and well worth the download.  It’s mostly invisible–the icon for it is unobtrusive and most of the time you won’t even notice that it’s there.  Highly recommended. 

Things I like:  It works.  It’s customizable, and it properly handles allowing an intercepted popup.

Things I dislike  Wood-grain border for the preferences page?  

Things I would change:  It’d be nice to be able to hide the icon entirely until it’s needed.  

An extension to leverage the use of URL shorteners, ViewThru allows the user the functionality of finding out where a short URL is pointing before following it.

URL shorteners have become popular more or less concurrent with the rise in popularity of Twitter:  the character limit that twitter imposes makes it a challenge to both tweet a meaningful URL and to provide some form of commentary upon it.  As such, services such as bit.ly have become popular, taking a short domain name and a bit of redirect scripting to develop a means of linking to content in as short a form as possible.

Unfortunately, this shortening obfuscates the destination URL, allowing for ‘Rickroll’ hijacking or potentially direction to other undesired–and potentially malicious–content.

ViewThru uses the API provided by most of the major URL shorteners, and provides an expanded view of where the URL is pointing.  It does this by, when the user hovers their mouse over the URL in question, showing a tooltip with the relevant information.  Conveniently, this not only works on websites but within other chrome apps–like, for instance, TweetDeck.

It’s a very simple functionality, but a very convenient one–not only does it enhance safety, but it saves the user from having to go through the redirect themselves to decide whether or not the URL is worth following.

Things I like:  Invisible operation except when needed; universal functionality within the browser

Things I don’t like: the hover window stays just a little shorter than I’d like

Things I’d like to change:  Longer hover window duration, slight delay before the window appears so I can mouse past a link without getting the popup

Yesterday’s post noted that the 100MB free quota appeared to be automatic with rollover to the new month; not so with the paid coverage–somewhat obviously; the paid coverage is intended to be month-to-month.

A query to Verizon Wireless returned an answer that, no, there was no way to reactivate the paid coverage while still within the purview of the free coverage, so the hassle of activation began again.

An important note: while the customer service number provided by the page appears to connect somewhere where there are clueful people–the lady with whom I spoke is only the second technical-support-type representative with whom I’ve ever been able to work effectively on the consumer side of things–they cannot activate the device there at this time; apparently they do not have the access level required to do so.  

When calling, if you do not have a security code set–I did not; if there was some means of setting it previously, I missed it–they’ll want your MEID in addition to your phone number.  To find that, hit the Wrench and call up the settings menu; select the Internet tab, and find the ‘Options’ button next to the Verizon connection.  The MEID can be found under the ‘Device’ tab.

There is a workaround for being unable to grab a connection (two, actually; sometimes you can get past the timeout window if you reload quickly, though that may just be having the luck to catch the server in a usable state):  when on a wifi (802.11) connection, connect to https://quickaccess.verizonwireless.com.  While you canot get usage information when on wifi, the activation page will still work well enough to stick in your credit-card info and get your 3g connection running again.

I’ve filed a couple of bug reports with Google for this issue already; activation is far too much of a chore, and so long as it takes more than a couple minutes to activate a month, the OS won’t be ready for primetime–users aren’t going to want to call up a call center unless they have to, and I have no doubt that when the OS goes live, the quality of the support staff will decline sharply.

Speaking of usage information, I may have found out how it’s accessed; I’ll have to see about writing an extension to display a meter of some sort.

An update regarding the ChromeOS revision that dropped last week–

Taking a look ’round the OS, outside of the features mentioned last time, there have been several other bugs that have been fixed.  Video seems to have smoothed out a bit, though I’m not sure if that’s actual or just perception–going to need to investigate that one further before I declare it ‘squashed’.  The filesystem has been made functional; both the USB port and the SD card reader can be made to read data–a big plus, especially if I’m going to be migrating legacy data to “The Cloud.”  Additionally, the issues that I’d noticed making SSL/TLS (the ones marked “https” for the nontechnical amongst you) connections last for longer than a couple minutes appear to have been resolved; GChat and GMail remain connected when on the wifi for at least a couple hours; this functionality was tested on both open and protected access points, including behind a NAT–I’m read to call that one fixed, as well.

Interestingly, the free 100MB automagically re-upped when the paid chunk ran out, which is handy; I’d read before that I’d have to re-up it every month by hand, which seemed rather antagonistic–if the functionality’s being offered free, then what’s the point in rubbing my nose in it every month?  I’m glad to see that VZW opted to allow automatic refresh here; it makes for a much better customer experience.  I’m still dreading the inevitable purchase page that’ll come up when I run through this 100MB, though–and I’m a little irked that my careful hoarding of my purchased GB had ~100MB left over from it at the end of the month; “rollover bytes” would be kinda nice to have.

There’ve been a couple of new bugs that have cropped up, of course–every once in a while, flash seems to go kaput; I’ve not managed to figure out anything consistent regarding that one.  The ‘home screen’–the tab that pops up with your app selections–seems to have corrupted text on the captions for the large icons….sometimes.  It’s not very consistent like that.

Also, the ‘known issues’ page doesn’t really have any change; there’s no real indication of versioning or progress reports on any of the ‘known issue’ bugs. 

On the whole, though, the user experience has improved; if this pace continues, then there should be a pretty reasonable OS for commercial distribution inside of six months–meaning that if they plan to release this in the spring, they’d better get a move on lest they end up looking like Microsoft or something.

When you live in the cloud, it’s helpful to have a portion of cloud to stash your stuff.  Ge.tt will fill that niche, at least temporarily.  

Ge.tt provides a dropbox service where users can stick files for sharing to other users.  Much like other noted dropbox services (rapidshare, etc.) there is no official search engine nor any external search engine capability provided; the only way to find a file is when someone tells you it’s there.  The interface is clean and simple; the sharing function is usable, and there’s really not much more to be said about basic functionality.

Much like some pastebins, inactive files (those that aren’t accessed on a regular basis) will be removed and inaccessible after a certain period of inactivity.  Registering for an account–which is free–will lengthen this time.  

One of the features mentioned is the ability to count how popular your file has been by counting visits and downloads–which is as advertised: it counts visits and downloads, cumulatively, since the datestamp marking when you first uploaded it.  They also advertise being able to begin sharing the file before it has finished uploading; I was unable to coordinate both a large upload and some observers to verify how that works.

It’s a fairly simple way to temporarily store files; like everything else on the “web 2.0″ it’s prominently marked “Beta”, so the absence of any overt monetizing method should not be too terribly alarming.

Things I like:  free (as yet), clean interface, no overt filesize limit

Things I dislike: not much; there’s one function here and it’s being addressed

Things I would change: it’d be nice to see a little more breakdown of the stats–perhaps an option to view a raw list of access times or something?

Advertised on Twitter by Stephen Fry, Pushnote is a chrome (and firefox, and IE) extension along the same vein as the Google Sidewiki, providing users with another layer of information when browsing the web.  In this case, it’s a sort of meta-forum, with the ‘notes’ (of about 2x the length Twitter allows you) being attached to specific websites.  The notes are attached to other social media (twitter, facebook) and can derive their pictures from there; this leverages the existing social connections, in a way, by ensuring that if one of your connections has made notes on a website you’ll be able to recognize that it was they who made them.

The extension works in just the same way as all of them do; there’s a button that hangs out beside the omnibox and which lights up if something relevant happens–green, if there’s content attached to your current page, and red if there’s new content elsewhere that you may want to pay attention to.  Upon activating the button on a website where there is content, a box opens up where the comments–again, about twice the length of a twitter, maximum–can be read.  Interestingly enough, some attempt at organization has been made in that replies to comments are (by default) hidden beneath the parent comment, and accessed through a link beneath the parent comment.  

The extension appears to use a Digg paradigm of user-driven moderation; comments can be voted up or down, and comments which are offensive can be reported via a ‘report abuse’ button.  The content of the comments is limited to plain text; html tags (such as links) are stripped out, presumably to close the obvious spam hole that would otherwise exist.  Additionally, the option is given to CC the posts you make to twitter or to facebook, should you wish.

Besides the current page’s attached notes, the commentbox allows a look at the top-rated comments on the web (mostly enquiring of other users brought to a page by Stephen Fry) and a list (with appropriate links) to the sites with the most comments attached; currently, twitter is leading the pack.  

The concept of another layer to reality is not novel; AR apps for smartphones, at any rate, have been around for some time, and google maps also allows different layers of information to be presented.  As mentioned above, google sidewiki is another project with a similar concept, that of attaching metainformation to webpages accessible to those with the correct interface.  What appears to make this app different is the social nature of it–it appears purposely designed to emulate the experience of “bumping into people at places,” like fortuitously meeting a friend at a coffeeshop.

(Idle thought: there may well be enhanced geotagging apps that do a similar function to this, but geographically, by now…)

Pushnote is a fun extension, but does raise a few issues–the potential exists, for instance, for putting all manner of reputationally-impacting comments on the layer attached to various websites, e.g., tagging a business website with unflattering information about how they scammed you or some such.  Given that these apps that access enhanced information layers are bound to become more popular in the future, it would perhaps be wise for a business to keep track of these enhanced content accessors and the potential impact on the business’ reputation.  

Things I like: interesting concept, fascinating new level of social interaction opened, Stephen Fry is involved

Things I dislike:  no way to access content without the plugin–a big minus for the companies who may be commented on without being aware of it

Things I would change: spawning the interface across the bottom of the screen with a movie audience cutout with two robot heads and a geek showing ;-P

Distractions are the bane of anyone seeking to write significant amounts of text–the best productivity is achieved when the author has fifteen minutes or so to get ‘in the zone’ where they can let their words flow freely and their prose becomes much more natural.  Writespace seeks to assist the author in this endeavor with a clean and distraction-free interface–it presents the author with a blank black screen with a few basic statistics (words, lines, characters) at the bottom in low-impact white text and a cursor.

That’s it.

The app page recommends using it in a full-screen mode in order to further minimize distractions–your computer becomes, in essence, one of the old-fashioned word processors.  There’s no menus, no bells and whistles; just a tabula rasa for you to fill with whatever you need to fill it with.  It doesn’t even have its own ‘find’ function–chrome’s find function works, though.

For first drafts, for long novels, and for things like literary analysis where print resources rather than online resources are used, this is a good paradigm.  The lack of any bells and whistles acts very much like a feature here, in that many modern word-processing programs have remarkably cluttered interfaces with ‘helpful’ widgets that actively pop up trying to ‘assist’ the user.  The no-frills attitude is an encouraging one, and one which I hope will be maintained; Writespace is an open source program, meaning that anyone can contribute, and that means there may be feature creep–people contributing ‘helpful’ features which may somewhat miss the point.  

There are a few features that I do wish they would include, though.  The existing configuration page (accessed via the ‘wrench’ icon in the corner of the app’s entry on the start page) offers a few basic configuration options (mostly to do with text colors and vertical/horizontal alignment) and the option to import a file–however, there is no option to export the current buffer to a file, nor are any file imports save from the local disk supported.  For the CR-48, this isn’t entirely suitable; without the option to, for instance, sync to google docs, the user is limited to copy/paste transfers, which get a little clumsy for large (novel-size) works.  The ability to write while offline is nice, but the limit of -only- writing offline doesn’t quite sell me on the app.

Things I like: clean interface, customizable to user spec, no mandatory network sync–good for distraction-free writing

Things I don’t like: inability to sync to network resources (or from them), no obvious documentation pointing to the configuration page

Things I would like to change: stick a sync button in the configuration page to allow for (for instance) google docs send/receive, more documentation–perhaps a ‘default document’ loads on first use to point the user to where the configuration page hangs out.