More iPhone. Yay! yippie... hoo...rah...(?)

Wow, that iPhone sure has some NEAT FEATURES (as seen on Conan).

Sure it can do that, but WILL IT BLEND?

More people are taking it apart, but what interests me is Apple's power management systems, and not just because I spent all day Saturday listening to the Live Earth Internet broadcast.

Apple v Apple

The real reason the Beatles are suing Apple Computer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcVS9ssNYVQ

A Websphere Blog

http://www.skywayradio.com/

Tim Berners-Lee and the Semantic Web

Just for hysterical raisins, the original proposal for the world wide web:

http://info.cern.ch/Proposal.html

And a recent interview with Tim about the "semantic web"

http://www.itworld.com/Tech/4535/070709future/index.html

There have been some interesting articles in ACM/IEEE pubs about relational documents on the web, but lunchtime is over.

iPhone

Awesome step by step how to take apart an iPhone. I swear I will never understand why some people don't want to take things apart.

http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone

Or access the device using an interactive shell

http://hackint0sh.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1408

And apparently the root password is "alpine" Gee I wonder what neighborhood burger joint they were having beers at when they came up with that?

Alternating Colors in a List

A bit of display code I came up with.

The problem: Your (database-driven) web page has a very long list of items and you want to make it easier to view.

The solution: Alternate background colors on each row, or preferably every third row, or fourth.

It's easy enough to alternate colors every other row, with code like this:

rowcount = 0

if (rowcount++ % 2) rowcolor = grey else rowcolor = white
...
next item

But I find that looks too busy. What if I want to have three lines of grey and then three lines of white? Given that I'm keeping the variable rowcount, I can simply modify the equation from:

if (rowcount % 2)

which, given the modulus of 2 will return a 0 if the rowcount is even, and 1 if the rowcount is odd; instead, try this:

if ((rowcount / 3) % 2)

What does this do? Well, first it divides the current row number by 3, no remainder. that means the first 3 rows (if you start with 0) divided by 3 will be 0, the next 3 will be 1, the next 3 will be 2, etc. The result of this divide will be alternating odd or even. That's where the modulus 2 comes in. Then you have a binary value alternating between 0 and 1 every 3 rows.

You can also divide by 4, 5, or any number to increase the number of rows in each color block.

I'll be looking for an example of a site that does this. The one I did is internal only, so no link here.