Month: December 2010

Posted from: ON L4S 2E4, CanadaAnother hopefully constructive rant.

I just spent more than 6 hours aggregating photos from our Far East cruise and vacation from this past fall. And I think I only processed about 20% of them so far. I think the photos were taken with over 5 different cameras of various form and quality. The trip had over 25 individuals, and as you can imagine there were many cameras amongst us.

Many photos were blurry and others had weird colors due to improper white balance settings.

With today’s photo processing and sharing technologies, my advice is that when going on vacation with a large group, just have two designated cameras and photographers who know what they are doing. They don’t have to be pros but at the very least should understand the notion of shutter speed and focus.

Okay my rant is over and now back to processing the pics. Arghh!

Posted from: ON L4S 2G6, CanadaAfter seeing the following TED talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/clay_shirky_how_cognitive_surplus_will_chan…

By Clay Shirky on the topic of cognitive surplus, I was reminded of a discussion this week on Facebook. Parties to the discussion thought users of Facebook are sharing private information without knowing the full consequences of their deeds. Although this is a common argument that I’ve heard of countless times, it does have its merits. This is a popular argument against the use of social networking sites like Facebook by parents, trying to ward off their innocent teenagers against unknown threats. However, after watching this insightful video and the idea that we are transitioning from a crowd of information consumers to a population (or dare I say a generation) of content creators, I now see platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to have the potential of being the general enablers of cognitive surplus, which Clay Shirky defines in the video.

Another idea that I noted when watching the video is that the quality of the content is less important than the ability to generate and share the content. This brings me back to some of the same ideas introduced in the book, “The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations”, published in 2004, written by James Surowiecki. I bring this up because it is easy to criticize mundane and stupid tweets on Twitter, such as when people tweet what they eat and when they go to bed. However the same pointless information may be useful in a different context. For example, a study on dietary habits or sleeping patterns. I guess in the world of cognitive surplus, it is better to have more information diluted by a spectrum of quality, than to have restricted information perhaps curated by a biased party.

Just jotting down some random thoughts after watching another inspirational TED video.

Last night I had trouble getting email from my iPhone.  It kept on reporting that it couldn’t communicate to the server.  I thought it was a server issue, so I left it overnight, but this morning it was exhibiting same symptoms.  We use Exchange 2007.  I proceeded with a few sanity checks.

• The email on my desktop function normally.
• The email via Outlook Web function normally.

With the above two checked, I knew that I was using the correct server and my login credentials were correct.

I’m using iOS 4.2.1 on an iPhone 4, so I started to Google for some answers, and came across this post.

• http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2656735&start=4

After backing up my iPhone, I fully reset the phone and erase all contents and data on it.  I then register the phone with iTunes as a brand new phone.  Before I sync anything to it, I checked my Exchange connectivity, and everything was back! I follow this step with a restore from the previous backup, and the Exchange account did not work again.  Therefore, I repeated the fully reset, but this time I skip the restore and setup everything manually again.

Note that just a full reset and restore will not work.  Neither does deleting the account and reset the account.  I also tried changing my account’s password, and that also had no effect.  Another symptom to be aware of is that while trying to setup the Exchange account again, the phone was unable to verify the account. From all of this, I concluded that the registration as a new phone was a critical and necessary step.  I don’t know what the root cause was, but it sure was a pain.  It literally started to happen. For a guy who travels a lot, I’m glad this didn’t happen while I was in transit.