Hello!  We at MBILF run @AmazonSteals on Twitter.  We’ve noticed we’re not getting very popular, even though we run some different deals than @AmazonDeals (a probably official account that tweets only Gold Box daily and lightning deals).  That’s to be expected, very few people know about it and it looks spammy to retweet that our followers should also follow AmazonSteals.  So we thought…

We pondered…

We cogitated…

We think we’ve got something you’ll REALLY like!  Ok, so who likes to buy things they like on Amazon? You? How would you like some free stuff from Amazon? Yes? We thought so!

We bet now you’d like to know how. It’s easy! Become and stay a follower of Amazon Steals between now and the end of January. On January 31st, 2009, we’ll take note of who’s following us.  On February 7th, we’ll take note of who’s still following us, and we’ll randomly pick three winners who will instantly become fashionable, popular people. The prizes are as follows:

• One $10 Amazon Gift Card (US Dollars)
• One $5 Amazon Gift Card (USD) and Half Life 2 via Steam download
• One $5 Amazon Gift Card (USD) and  Half-Life 2: Episode One via Steam download

And the winners will be as follows:

1. First prize gets their choice of any one of the above prizes.
2. Second prize gets their choice of one of the two remaining prizes.
3. Third prize gets the remaining prize.

The Fine Print (dun-dun-DAAAA!)

• Don’t be greedy, one entry per person. If you must have your duplicate accounts following @AmazonSteals, please disclose this via @reply to @AmazonSteals from the non-qualifying accounts. If we suspect dupes, all suspect accounts will be ineligible.
• We’ll be tracking who follows and leaves. If you follow by Jan. 31 and unfollow before Feb 7, you’re disqualified.
• Winners will be chosen solely at our discretion. We won’t play favorites, we just want to ensure people play fair.
• Do not taunt happy fun ball.
• January 31 and February 7 start at midnight U.S. Eastern Standard Time. That’s where we are. If you’re in California, just join 3 hours early, it won’t hurt.
• No purchase is necessary, and our giveaway is void where prohibited by law.
• Winners will be notified via Twitter direct message on how to collect your prize during the week of February 8th. If we do not hear from you within 48 hours, you’re disqualified and the next winner in line takes your place.

I reported last night (on Twitter) that Dreamhost was offering one year of hosting (and a domain) for $9.24 if you use coupon code 777. I thought it was fishy that the text at the bottom said it expired the same day, but I thought maybe it just ended for Christmas. It’s still there today, with the expiry date moved back to today.

Grey saw my tweet and mentioned he saw a different deal going on. I hard refreshed mine after taking a screenshot and didn’t see it, and he still saw his after a hard refresh on his end. To help, he provided this lovely screenshot.

Now I’ve got a new one after loading the page in a different browser, code 2008 (the suckiest one of them all, in my opinion).

I know this may come as a shock to many diggers (as that seems to be where the inaccurate story was popularized), and I know they’ll bury this story because it doesn’t play up to their fanciful notion that Mozilla is a rogue crew of hackers subverting Steve Jobs control on the Mac OS X platform, but Mozilla didn’t reverse engineer shit. If you belive a random unsourced blogger, I’ve got some WMDs in Iraq for you to tell congress about. Let’s go into detail, with sources this time!

Let’s look at Bug 412486, the Mozilla bug for adding support for multi-touch trackpad gestures. In particular, let’s check out comment 3:

Comment #3 From Samuel Sidler (:ss | :sps) 2008-02-05 10:26:52 PST

See also: http://cocoadex.com/2008/02/nsevent-modifications-swipe-ro.html

Check it out, a post on Cocoadex from February, 2008, shortly after the new macbooks with multi touch were released. Pay attention to the bolded portion especially of this quote:

So, I’m sure you’ve heard of the Macbook Air and it’s revolutionary multi-touch trackpad, borrowed from the iPhone technology. The basic gist of it is that it provides application specific gestures that can be triggered by performing some gestures on the new trackpad. With that in mind, every Cocoa developer should be asking themselves this question: What has Apple done to NSEvent [and friends] to facilitate gestures in their own applications and how can I do it in mine?

With the help of my local Apple Store’s Macbook Air, and some NSEvent knowledge, I’m going to answer exactly that.

Yes, he went to the Apple Store and did his own digging to find out how to code multi touch support shortly after the new Air came out. Unfortunately, Elliot of Cocoadex does not work for Mozilla nor on Firefox. To make super sure that I was getting this correct, I contacted Tom Dyas, the person the bug is assigned to and the author of the patch adding multitouch support. He responded early this morning:

Nobody from Mozilla had to reverse engineer the undocumented API as the information had already been discovered by someone in the Mac OS blogging world. Go to
http://cocoadex.com/2008/02/nsevent-modifications-swipe-ro.html for the blog article that had the information. This is the same link that is listed in Bug 412486 and in comments in the patch itself.

I know this won’t quell the massive spread of this complete lie, but did you know who Edward Lee was and why TG Daily didn’t link to their source? Because Edward Lee said nothing of the sort about Mozilla REing it! Here’s what he actually said:

From what I quickly gathered, the gestures interface was reverse engineered from some private Apple API, so things might change at any time!

He doesn’t know for sure (he’s right, though), but he definitely didn’t say Mozilla did the reverse engineering.

TG Daily is taking facts, turning them into lies, and then not citing sources to hide this. I’m really not surprised, and what’s even less surprising is how the lie spreads. A good reporter would do a LITTLE bit of research, it took me barely any and I only e-mailed Tom Dyers to make absolutely sure I was getting it right. He didn’t take long to respond at all, only a few hours. I hope this inspires other journalists to do more investigation before posting.

Twitter has a reasonably reasonable set of @ reply settings. There are downsides, like idiots who mention a twitter account as the first word in a post, e.g. “@jX is so damn cool.”, where the tweet will be seen as a reply to jX and those who don’t follow him AND don’t see all @ replies, or who set their setting to no @ replies, will not see it.  That’s why if you’re trying to publicize something, you should link the account somewhere after the start of your post.

However, there’s a way around this that functions as intended.  Twitter recently added a long-requested feature, and now that the web bugs seem to have been worked out it’s helping awesomely.  This feature also is available in the API, and some Twitter applications have been updated to tell Twitter what post you’re replying to.  The feature is a new line: in_reply_to_status_id.  If this isn’t specified in an @reply, the latest tweet id is pulled.  However, if you’re using cURL or another application you can modify, you can reply to a specific tweet id and still have people who don’t see @ replies see it!  AND it shows up in the Replies tab on the website (and thus in your twitter clients that support viewing replies)!

For cURL, you should do it like this (I tried with the status before the in_reply_to_status_id but it didn’t work).  Here’s an example reply to this tweet from @AmazonSteals:

curl -u email:password -d in_reply_to_status_id=1043114166 -d status="This is actually a reply and will show up in the replies page too." http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

This is all obvious and I won’t explain any of it.  However, I have successfully tested it and the tweet shows up in @AmazonSteals replies page and also in another user’s tweetstream that doesn’t follow amazonsteals and has no @ replies as their setting.  This could be a bug, but I like to think of it as a special feature: almost nobody will go to these lengths to post an @reply in their stream that everyone can see.  Perhaps it could be used for trackbacks.  Maybe someone would tweet “I just bought a Fuzion Scooter from Amazon that I saw on @AmazonSteals” and set their in_reply_to_status_id to be 1043114166 so that it functions as a trackback.  That’d be pretty cool.

If this post becomes popular and such, it’d be nice if Twitter added a separate feature allowing someone to indicate a post isn’t a reply so they CAN say “@jX is so cool”.

I’ve noticed one thing at every company I’ve worked at and every company someone I’ve known worked at was common: the person in charge of scheduling when workers worked hated it.  They had to have information about when you’d not be available way ahead of time, and would even mess up schedules and have to issue corrections for people who were over/under scheduled afterward.  This is bad.

I did some fruitless googling for [timesheet software] and [scheduling software], both of which turn up semi-relevant results.  [timesheet software] gets mainly results for websites that are basically stopwatches for people who don’t know how to write down the time that’s on their watch, and not for creating future time sheets.  [scheduling software] gets some of the previous stuff, plus stuff for scheduling appointments.  This is frustrating.

What needs to exist (and I may eventually code and make tens of dollars from) is software that can do this:

• take ical files from subscriptions in, and assign them to users/people
• determine which is ‘busy’ time and thus should avoid scheduling the person for those hours, plus some buffer time for transport, this should be configurable based upon how long it takes the person to get there normally and optionally check the ‘location’ from the ical file, sort up a map, and add a 10% buffer or so for traffic depending upon time of day and average traffic
• also let users post ‘preferable’ days so that the persons hours will try to be scheduled those days

I am tired of seeing the errors.  Also, this would end up great for people who want to organize meetings between friends, and meetings in the workplace too.

Seriously, this has to exist somewhere.

Edit: Meet-O-Matic is a good start.

Edit 2: I randomly ran across Visual Staff Scheduler Pro 10, which looks interesting. So maybe it does exist.

Edit 3: Found via Reddit: NeedtoMeet, and redditors suggested Doodle and WhenIsGood, none of which do the timesheet stuff, but do help with meeting scheduling.