• Siri Can’t Map Canada

    My desk neighbour showed up to work this morning with a brand new iPhone 4S. He let me play around with Siri a bit.

    Looks like Siri is not fully functional in Canada.

    Referencing location (eg. “Where am I?”) results in an error message stating that directions and maps are unavailable in Canada.

    Update: Now with a screenshot.


  • MySQL Full-Text Search Is Broken!

    …and has been for 8 years.

    I came across MySQL bug #2095 today:

    full-text search for words containing hyphens won't work
    Submitted: 11 Dec 2003 6:15
    Hyphen '-' characters break literals at the moment.
    A search for something like "GATA-D22S690" finds
    all entries containing GATA and not the full 
    hyphenated text.

    ~ Link

    MySQL disputes the fact that this is a bug.

    But in reality – as the submitters points out – there are many cases where hyphens are part of words. The example I ran into tonight was product model numbers (eg. “00-17” or “j-35”).

    The MySQL docs recommend recompiling or modifying one of two system files.  None of these options are feasible in a shared hosting environment.

    I can’t believe this bug exists. As far as I’m concerned this is a complete and utter deal breaker for any application that needs to search non-word strings containing hyphens. I’ve been exclusively using MySQL for my entire career and I now know that a bunch of sites I’ve worked on in the past 10 years were launched with this bug.

     


  • Will Siri Work In Canada?

    My friend @iamhabitat on twitter just pointed out that Siri is not listed as one of the features on Apple Canada’s iPhone 4S page.

    Does this imply that the feature will not be available in Canada? How disappointing would that be?!

    I had assumed that it would. I guess we’ll find out when iOS5 comes out tomorrow.

    Update: Yes, Yes it does. But it doesn’t seem to know how to map in Canada (at least not yet).