iPhone Lillies
Oct 152008
Here is a story on the BBC about a USB device that you plug into your PC to enable it to be put to sleep at the touch of a single button. It is incredible that some one is selling a product to do that. For starters my Macs do it by default. Just close the lid of a laptop or touch the power button on a iMac and they go to sleep. They come back pretty instantly as well. The other point is that I am sure my old Dell desktop used to have the option to set the power button to do precisely this behaviour with Windows XP though of course it used to take hours to come back and used to crash on me etc. One could always set the PC to power down gracefully as you stop using it i.e slow the disc then the screen then the processor and full sleep after a few minutes of non-use but that would take more thought.
There is nothing like a gaget to fix bad design and sloppy thinking. They’ll make a fortune with it.
Aug 072008
Well I wrote a basic application that would allow people to sit together virtually and I tried it out on my own. I logged in and logged out at the beginning and end of a couple of sessions and the whole thing seemed really unsatisfactory. This means I must break the first precept and kill the iZendo concept stone dead. It is a shame but there you have it.
So I start writing iZendo from scratch and make quite good progress in simplifying it down. Just four pages and some AJAX to update the lists. All looks good till my crisis of faith! Could I do this with twitter? Could I ‘just’ have a Twitter feed that is the virtual zendo? It would certainly save a lot of effort and would integrate with all the IM and phone systems etc.
The trouble is I can’t see how we get a public page that updates in near real time to show messages from multiple people. The zendo would have to follow people and look for messages that said they were meditating or it would have to wait for direct messages and post them back as messages on its own page so others could see them. None of these things work. Even if I used the API the app would need to poll the server all the time and there can be quite long delays on this. We are limited to once a minute for starters. This would need to run on a ‘real’ server not a hosted space.
Looks like it isn’t feasible but maybe I should sleep on it.
Thanks for listening,
Aug 032008
This is the first post from my iPhone using the iphone app – but then edited on my desktop – I am not that fast at typing on an iPhone yet!
I found that the problem I was having with connecting the iPhone was not with the iPhone WordPress app (v1.0) but with my WordPress (v2.6) install. The call to the xmlrpc rsd function was timing out. It was taking > 1 minute and so the iPhone would just die waiting. When I called it from a regular browser it would eventually load and display the list of APIs supported by the WordPress XMLRPC client.
I am not paid to do this kind of thing and just wanted it working so I was not about to launch into learning about the whole WP blog software and WP iPhone app. I had already spent an hour with the iPhone app in the XCode debugger to get this far. I simply commented out all the APIs that I wasn’t interested in getting to function and hey presto it works. I also created an uploads folder with the correct permissions so I can send photos.
Here is a step by step of what I did:
- This assumes your own WordPress 2.6 install (you are not using WordPress.com) – it may work with other verions. You are having problems getting your iPhone WordPress app to connect to your blog at all. The app just runs and runs and dies.
- Call the XMLRPC rsd function on you blog. To do this just go to /xmlrpc.php?rsd. If it takes a long time to come back (over 30 seconds) this may be your problem. Here is an example from a blog on WordPress.com:
- Calling this on my blog would take two minutes before I removed the other APIs from the call. Call my blog and see the result.
- To do this I just commented out a series of lines in the xmlrpc.php file. If you look at this file in a text editor you should be able to work out what to do even if you have a miniscule amount of PHP knowledge. You could delete them if you kept a backup.
While you are looking at the files in the WP install you could create an ‘uploads’ directory in your wp-content directory and set the permissions so the webserver can write to it. This will allow you to upload photos as well.
Obviously if you use any of those XML-RPC APIs to update your blog it will break those APIs. It shouldn’t break the data feeds of those name though. See my atom feed still works:
http://www.hyam.net/blog/wp-atom.php
Warning: this is just friendly chat. I take no responsibility for any actions you take. Your blogs are in your hands.
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