In LA

5/19/2010 4:43pm Edit: I’ve been told this feature was in the previous version of the app. I just never happened across it

The official iPhone Twitter client is finally up in the app store, today, now. The app,”Twitter”, is actually version 3 of what used to be called “Tweetie”. Twitter bought Tweetie, and what was previously an excellent commercial app is now free and improved.

The “Nearby” feature of Tweetie v2, which showed a list of nearby recent tweets, has been updated for v3. It’s more difficult to find this feature in the new version of the app, as it is accessed via an unlabeled button, but it’s there and has been significantly upgraded. Now one can see not just a list of nearby tweets, but tweets in any area, overlaid on a Google map.

On the one hand, I’m all about openness, and it seems pretty cool to be able to see what people in a given area are tweeting, overlaid on a map.

On the other hand, the ease with which any of us iPhone Twitter users¹ can now be tracked down by stalkers, paparazzi, their mothers, and other ne’er-do-wells is a little scary.

Change. Scary and neato, at the same time.

1. iPhone Twitter users who opt-in for the app’s location feature when asked, that is. [↩]

The house is set to vote on a big healthcare bill on Sunday, and I haven’t really been keeping up on the massive changes that the plan has gone through on its way to the vote, so I did some poking around on the net today. Maybe these links will be of use to others as well.

• Here’s a quick summary of what the bill puts forth (from The New York Times):

  The bills would expand coverage by making more lower-income people eligible for Medicaid, and by offering subsidies to help moderate-income people buy insurance. They would forbid insurance companies from denying coverage of pre-existing conditions, and would create insurance exchanges — new government-regulated marketplaces where individuals and small businesses could come together to buy coverage. The 160 million Americans who get their coverage through their employer would stay with that insurance. Nearly everyone would be required to get insurance or face a penalty, and businesses would be required to provide coverage or contribute to its cost.

• It looks like there’s a decent breakdown of the healthcare bill on a CNN blog.
• A slightly more detailed summary is here at CNN
• The white house’s sales pitch for the plan

One of the more rational-sounding objections I often hear about the Obama administration’s focus on healthcare reform (which should be called “health insurance reform”) is that, with the economy in a sorry state, this is the wrong time to be focusing on health care costs. To my mind this argument is a non-starter and a false dichotomy. There’s no reason to believe that healthcare reform is unrelated to, and can’t be considered at the same time as pressing economic repairs. In a system in which most people have health insurance tied to employment; A rise in unemployment leads to a rise in under or uninsured people.

The question that matters to me is how this plan will affect the economic and social well-being of this country. Will it drive up the deficit? (the CBO says it’ll do the opposite, I’m sure I’ll find plenty of voices that disagree). Will it drive up insurance costs? (The proposed market for people and companies to shop for insurance sounds like an interesting way to lower costs using market forces). What is a “cadillac” insurance plan? I’ll be poking around those links and others to try and figure out what I can today to decide whether to call my representative to offer a word of encouragement.

Yesterday I posted a link to my Tor bridge and links to information on how to set up such a bridge. Several visitors went to the effort of setting up Tor bridges on their computers and then posted their Tor bridge links as comments to that earlier post. Very cool. Unfortunately, in my blog’s current design, comments are only visible when viewing that blog entry directly and don’t show up on the main page. In order to better expose those Tor bridge links in case anyone needs them, I’m re-posting them below:

1. 67.165.94.243:443 AF293E70D1DB3AF126B3BD6F5DD2B4D904705BB0
2. 24.2.226.175:443 F4D078BDFDA345F2A1299B3FF55ECC921959F366
3. 66.30.41.122:34983 46EF32AACC7EFD3FCB7CED651BAFC190122DA8F4
4. 71.174.111.132:9000 28A2DC5E9853A5CE0A35F20EB345690200BB042A
5. 71.203.101.115:9001 3B45A28070BF7669C282030E85F475C91A222195
6. 75.84.153.203:9001 8BA6A76D36F5A9830F25B5D8315906434AEE50FF
7. 213.163.90.5:443 3BDBCFE76B74A3D117DB2967AA682A00C7A91D3A
8. 91.66.240.177:443 9F1B11827EFAF23CD18E60960E1C2A7EE95A7BF1

If you happen to be in Iran and need uncensored access to the internet, you can hopefully use these Tor bridges to bypass the Iranian government’s block of gmail, facebook, twitter, etc. Here are links to the Tor software in English and in Farsi.

If more Tor bridges are added as comments to this or to the previous post, I’ll edit this post to include them.

2009-06-17 11:38am PST edit: +2 bridges.

Folk in Iran and several other places happen to have governments who’ve decided that news and social networking sites on the internet should be blocked. Affected people can bypass such blocks by using a Tor bridge. Those of us who have high-speed connections and live in areas with little or no internet censorship can help by setting up Tor bridges on our personal computers and publishing our Tor bridge links to twitter, facebook, etc.

I spent a few minutes setting up a Tor bridge on my computer. Here’s the link to mine:

75.84.153.203:9001 8BA6A76D36F5A9830F25B5D8315906434AEE50FF

Simple instructions are available on the net for those of you who would also like to set up a Tor bridge on your computer (all OSes are welcome).

Thanks to the “Ian’s Brain” post Tor and the Iranian Election for the great idea.

A few relevant links:

• Download Tor
• Download Tor in Farsi
• Download Tor in Chinese (Simplified)

Hopefully this sort of information is already out there in the native languages of the folk who need it most.

No word on whether Saddam saw the film during its theatrical run, but apparently he watched the film in captivity, involuntarily, multiple times. As much as I enjoy that film, and as bad a guy as Saddam Hussein was, I can’t help but feel there’s an uncomfortable bit of the schoolyard bully at play in the action of forcing the man to repeatedly watch a film in which he’s depicted as Satan’s gay lover.

In any case, if you were curious whether Saddam ever saw his star turn in “South Park; Bigger, Longer, and Uncut”, you now have your answer.

“It was a loooot of fun!,”

“We visited the Detainees camps and we saw the jails, where they shower, how the(y) recreate themselves with movies, classes of art, books. It was very interesting,”

“I didn’t want to leave, it was such a relaxing place, so calm and beautiful,”

–Miss Universe, Dayana Mendoza

Words fail me.¹

Here’s the article.

1. Actually they don’t, I could say “Reality is determined to make all media become The Onion.” But isn’t my original statement more dramatic? [↩]

I ran across this baked good yesterday and was floored. I had to take a photo for posterity. Apparently brownies¹ are now an official delivery method for a prescription medication, at least in California, where it’s not exactly as illegal as it is elsewhere in the U.S. to inhale, or apparently, ingest –as long as you’re a 25-year-old who can convince a doctor to give you a prescription to help with your “glaucoma”.

I hope they start selling weed kügel over in the Fairfax district if California legalizes the chronic.

Technorati Tags: brownie, California, chocolate, clear plastic container, demon weed, Garbanzo Beans, marijuana, pot, pot brownie, prescription pot, prohibition, forward thinking, so cute, the sky is falling

1. cupcakes too? [↩]

The recount continues in the Minnesota senatorial race, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune has put up scans of every contested ballot. Site visitors who login are able to peruse these ballots, attempt to determine voter intent, and tell the site whether they think the voter meant to vote for Al Franken or Norm Coleman. At the moment, they have 6700 contested ballots available for perusal.

Want to know why vote totals change during a recount? Go to the site and see for yourself. The fourth estate is alive and well in Minneapolis, bringing needed transparency to a mystifying political process. This is just too cool.

I ran my third half-marathon a week ago, the Las Vegas Half-Marathon, and bested my previous finishing by nearly six minutes. In order to better visualize my progress over the past 3 such runs, I tortured Excel into producing a graph of my finishing times. It looks like a nice and linear progression. If my finishing times continue to drop at the same rate I’ll be setting world records within two years, and a year or two after that I’ll be running faster than traffic and will be able to ditch my car and commute around LA on foot. Extrapolating the trend any further starts to get more complicated, I don’t understand the theory of general relativity well enough to detail the implications of negative finishing times .

But in any case, I’m happy to be improving at this whole long-distance running thing. Next up: my first full marathon, at Disney World in January.

I just overheard a colleague saying that British and American citizens have been targeted in a number of simultaneous attacks in Mumbai, India, and that there have been at least 80 people killed. I’m not going to rehash the actual news item here, because it’s already awful now and will probably be worse by the time anyone reads this post. But I do want to point out how well the web as a community is working to collect, analyze, and aggregate all the news. Much information on the attacks can be gleaned from a scan of a few websites:

• news.google.com has automatically collected a set of 458 articles at the time of this writing.
• The Wikipedia article on the 26 November 2008 Mumbai attacks includes photos and a rundown of all currently known information as well as links and references to articles on the attacks and on the locations and groups involved.
• Vinukumar Ranganathan is a photographer in Mumbai, shooting photos in the danger zone. He has been uploading a series of up-to-the-minute photos that can be viewed in his flickr stream. The shots of bystanders, police with automatic weapons, and the aftermath of explosions are maybe more atmospheric than informative, but it’s interesting to me to see a semi-unedited series of news photos and attempt to piece together an interpretation.