OhRyan.ca

It looks like the privacy hippies were finally right about something, your mobile phone really is a pocket sized tracking device.

Turns out that as of iOS 4.0, iPhones have been tracking your physical movements and logging it along with the phone’s backups.

A small team of researchers have discovered these logs in iTune’s backup files, they’ve released a handy little app that collects all the data from your user folder and plots it on a map. iPhoneTracker.app and further information available here.

Here is the visualization of everywhere I’ve been since Sept 28, 2010:

You can see lots of activity in and around Winnipeg (including trips up to the Gimli and Victoria Beach), a flight to Toronto and subsequent travel around southern Ontario and a road trip to Minneapolis. It’s fascinating.

I’m not sure if this is a terrifying privacy hole or a neat little hidden feature. I’m leaning towards neat feature, since the data is stored locally on your computer and can be encrypted automatically by iTunes.

At this point in time a method for disabling the “feature” does not exist. I expect Apple will be responding in short order.

This weekend we made a road trip down to the Twin Cities in Minnesota. While this was probably my 12th (or 20th?) trip down to Minneapolis, I observed a few random things I had not noticed on previous trips.

1. Winnipeg does an excellent job of snow clearing! Almost all of surface roads we came across in Minneapolis – including major thoroughfares like Lyndale and Hennipen –  only had 1 and a half lanes cleared. I’m not talking about a few inches after a heavy dumping, I’m talking about several feet of accumulated snow. This would never stand in Winnipeg.
2. In the absence of a uniting brand like Tim Hortons, old people hang out at “regular” coffee shops like Starbucks and Caribou. I wonder how this affect their brand image.
3. The Kindle has free 3G anywhere in the world! The ability to pull up wikipedia on the Interstate in the Middle of North Dakota is amazing!

About a month and a half ago The Big Webshow featured WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg, listening to the interview it became really clear that WP is trying to position itself as a website “operating system.” While there are probably other platforms much more capable of the task, WordPress’ ubiquity is sort of pushing it in that direction regardless. Since that interview I’ve been meaning to take a closer look at WordPress.

Over the weekend I finally had a chance to dive in to theme and plugin development.
Overall, I found WordPress to be very easy to work with, I didn’t find myself running into any dead-ends like I have with other platforms and CMSes. I thought I’d share my impressions in the form of a pros v cons list.

Cons

• WP is not model-view-controller framework, as far as I can tell from first brush there’s nothing MVC about it. I’ll admit, I’m not really sure how this would improve theme/plugin development or the application as as a whole. I do think that the WordPress codebase has a lack of structure and organization; MVC is a great way to organize a project.
• WP is not object oriented. With the exception of the database wrapper, I didn’t come across any objects. Poking around WordPress themes and plugins reveals a bunch of global wordpress functions, things like ‘add_filter() ,’ ‘wp_enqueue_script().’ Everything you’d need to do in wordpress is a function. Exposing everything as a global function leads to the potential problem of of introducing a bug by creating a function with the same name an existing wordpress function (minor annoyance) and again, leads to code that’s hard to follow and disorganized. Function names aren’t always clear, some functions accept a call back, other return a value, etc.
• WP does not use a template engine, all template variables, functions and statements are included as inline PHP tags. Inline PHP is impossible to read, hard to follow, leads to spaghetti and generates even uglier HTML. Additionally, template engines such as Smarty add useful features like robust caching options. I did find a plugin to add smarty support, may be worth investigating.
• I really feel like these first three issues are pretty close to PHP’s worst practices. The overall lack of structure tends to generate sloppy, hard to read, amateur-looking code; the sort of thing that RoR snobs like to make fun of.
• Finally, I suspect WordPress might be highly inefficient (but I haven’t done the research). Specifically the way plugins are allowed to add handlers and filters to various points in the application workflow seems like a problem. If every plugin has to be scanned for on every page load…well that’s just not going to scale well. Each installed plugin (hypothetically) increases processing time.

Pros

• In spite of, or possibly because of issues I mentioned, extending WordPress is fairly simple and easy to pick up.
• The documentation at wordpress.org is pretty great! On par with php.net‘s own documentation.
• With such a large userbase, almost every plugin you could possibly want is already written for you.
• It’s stable. It doesn’t go down randomly. It’s not buggy.

Admittedly a lot of the shortcoming I found are based on a lot of assumptions and only a basic knowledge of WordPress. Also, I will concede that “your code is ugly” is a fairly superficial criticism that doesn’t inherently mean anything. So, in conclusion, I am not anti-wordpress. I like it as a very-extensible blogging platform, but I’m still a little skeptical about is pontential usefulness as a general-purpose CMS or some sort of website framework.

If you’re a wordpress guru, I’d like to hear you input. Tell me why I’m wrong.

Eating lunch? Got a second? Do this. Seriously.

In a blog post today Facebook detailed some of their new security improvements:

Starting today we’ll provide you with the ability to experience Facebook entirely over HTTPS. You should consider enabling this option if you frequently use Facebook from public Internet access points found at coffee shops, airports, libraries or schools. The option will exist as part of our advanced security features, which you can find in the “Account Security” section of the Account Settings page.

Enabling this option will effectively prevent you against Firesheep and similar account hijacking methods. I think it’s fairly safe to assume this feature is a direct response to Firesheep, even if it seems to have taken them 4 months to roll out. Though, it could also be a response to Zuckerburg’s account hack yesterday.

I’m going to go one step further than Facebook and say, you should absolutely enable this option as soon as it’s available to you.