The point of my trip was to addend a conference held inside the beautiful Tampa Convention Center.  By the end of the first day, the combination of roaming and no service had proven itself fatal to my battery.  I didn’t see a Sprint signal all day.  By the conclusion of Day One at 5 PM, my phone wouldn’t turn on.  Makes it kind of hard to talk to your coworkers and arrange to find dinner in a foreign town.  Thankfully I ran into a coworker with AT&T service who was able to help me out getting in touch with others.

On Day Two, I wised up.  I placed the phone in airplane mode at all times when I would normally put it on silent…a good 80-90% of the time between 8 AM and 5 PM of the conference day while in sessions.  I know that one of the biggest losses of battery power is the search of the Sprint signal when roaming.  As I found out, airplane mode didn’t make a difference.  Without me even activating the display almost the entire day, the phone had completely drained its battery.  Again, I had to link up with AT&T and Verizon friends to find places for dinner.

To answer your question, no I don’t have excessive background apps running at any given time.  In fact, despite being a techie, I’m very app-stingy.  I don’t need an app to do everything.  A browser, e-mail, SMS, and occasionally navigation are all I typically use in a day, and they’re all built in.  Sure, I have one or two convenience apps installed, but none that should be eating battery in the background constantly.

Completely fed up at this point, on Day Three I brought my charger with me to the conference.  I had to sit next to the wall for every presentation to keep the phone plugged in.  I suppose it didn’t matter, because I didn’t have service anyway to receive calls or texts, but boy could I use that Memo app!  Ridiculous.

Shortly after I returned home, I e-mailed Sprint to let them know about my experience.  Surely they’d want to know.  They’re the only cell provider I’ve ever had.  I enjoy their pricing and (previously) their service.

This morning I got a call from the “displeased customer” department of Sprint and spoke to William (who evidently gave me a special customer support number where you never wait on hold).  I explained my situation to him in greater depth.  He was very understanding and patient.  William brought up the service maps for my hotel in Tampa and my home address, and assured me that the Sprint network was very powerful in both areas, so my phone must be a lemon.  He opened a case and asked me to please bring my phone to my nearest Sprint store for a diagnosis.  ”If there’s nothing wrong with the phone,” he says, “just give me a call back and we’ll go from there to see what we can do for you.  Thanks for choosing Sprint.”  He even sent me an e-mail to make sure I had written down his phone number and extension.  I was impressed.

That’s where the positive customer service experience stopped.  I made an appointment during my lunch break and explained the situation in the appointment details.  Upon arrival at the store, I announced to the employee that greeted me that I had an appointment.  Without any further consultation, or even asking my name to review my appointment details, I was ushered back and given a form asking me to:

• Authorize a factory reset of my phone
• Reveal any passwords that lock my phone
• Authorize Sprint to store a local archive of the contents of my phone

Needless to say, I refused to sign.  First of all, I’m there for a diagnosis, which certainly wouldnt require a factory reset.  They should be guiding me to disable any passwords, not reveal them to me.  And I certainly do not want some person haphazardly copying my personal data, including the names, pictures, and phone numbers of my friends, onto a questionable local Sprint server.  Does Sprint not realize the amount of people’s lives that are on a phone?  Sure, I understand that you need to access my phone to work on my device, but a huge number of people use one password for everything, so disabling the password and logging out of apps like Facebook and Twitter should be standard operating procedure before every cell phone service appointment.

Unfortunately, the Sprint representative at the store refused to look up my Sprint eCare number in the store so I had to replay my entire scenario to him (he was born and raised in Florida, so this provided some friendly banter).  He understood that I didn’t want a hard reset, so I could just pay my $35 and come back in 3 hours to pick up…

What?  $35?  What for?  ”Oh, that’s the standard repair fee,” he said.  ”Well, I’m not here for repair, I’m here for a diagnosis.  Besides, Sprint asked me to come here for you to run it.  If you’d just look at my eCare number…”  ”I mean, we always charge a repair fee.”  ”But this isn’t a repair…”

No matter how many times I said, I’m not here for a repair, I’m here for a Sprint-Authorized Diagnosis, I was met with the same $35 repair fee comment (“we’ll figure out what’s wrong and that $35 covers the repair”).  Naturally, I asked for the manager, who wouldn’t budge, or even have the courtesy to look up the Sprint eCare number.  If there’s nothing wrong with the phone that they can diagnosis, then I would have paid $35 for the privilege of calling William back and saying, “okay, now what?”  ”Well, we don’t have to take your credit card, we can just add it to your monthly statement…”

I left and immediately called back my buddy William, though one of his co-workers answered.  ”I’m sorry William didn’t tell you, but we always charge a $35 fee.”  He tells me that this fee covers any repair costs, or a replacement if they cannot fix the phone.  …but we’re trying to troubleshoot a signal availability and/or battery life issue.  The phone itself is not malfunctioning in any way right now.  You should just be measuring the ability for the antenna to pick up a signal, verify that PRLs are getting installed correctly, etc.  That can’t take more than a few minutes.

The new agent also stated that if I still had problems once they “fix” my phone for $35 that I’d have to pay an additional $35 every time I go back to the store for additional “service.”  Their “service” is not warranted.  ”…not unless you upgrade to our Total Equipment Protection Plan.  I can sell that to you for….”  No.  ”Well, if you want to go ahead and add another line to your plan, you can add the Protection Plan…”

Why would I want to buy another phone line with you when the first one you sold me does not work?  He apologized and let me know that, “if you ever have signal coverage problems again, call while you’re having the problem so we can try to diagnose over the phone.”  I explained to him that if I find myself not having signal, that because I don’t have signal, I will be unable to call.  ”Oh.  Yeah.”  Indeed, Sprint. Indeed.

So, I find myself even more furious with Sprint and receiving no compensation for the week without service (at least $20 with my “everything” plan), or the waste of a few hours of the work day talking with them and going to their store to be harassed.

In recent weeks, Sprint has removed their Sprint Premier program (of which I was a member) and announced that they will be switching from WiMAX to LTE 4G connectivity.  I currently pay and extra $10/month for “premium data” (aka WiMAX 4G — not that my hometown has coverage).  This recent announcement, while I support since the rest of the world is LTE, renders my phone useless by 2013 when they repurpose the WiMAX towers for LTE.  The Epic 4G has made it to the Sprint EOL list, in favor of the Samsung Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch (note to Samsung, get a new PR department), less than one year after its release.  I should know, I activated my phone on launch day.  The phone is stuck on Android 2.2, which was released well before the Epic even shipped with 2.1, with no hope for any updates now.  Recent updates of Google-branded apps, like Google+, have features that will only work on Android 2.3.

Where does that leave me?  I’m stuck with a battery-hogging, obsolete smartphone that I must replace before 2013, questionable coverage (whether this is Sprint’s or Samsungs fault, we won’t know), and an open eCare ticket (20111007211058034, KMM91601233V65506L0KM).

Don’t worry Sprint, it will be closed soon, just as soon as I send you my ETF.

It’s pretty simple to use.  Import GPFRemoteAlert.[hm] into your project and replace the server address in kGPFRemoteAlertServer with your own address.  Have your AppDelegate download alerts at launch (application:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:). When you ship your app, put [[GPFRemoteAlert sharedRemoteAlert] displayAlertsForModule:@"UNIQUE_ID"]; in spots where you may want to have an alert in the future. I’d suggest one per UIView in viewDidLoad. If you ever want to display an alert, just add it to the XML file on your server and all your users will see it, without shipping an update to the AppStore.

I still need to add some more features, like only showing the alert once and limiting based on the device hardware, but it’s still very functional as-is. Right now, you can only limit based on version number of your app. I hope this helps someone else!

Quit Twitterrific, then paste these commands into Terminal (making a backup of the app first, especially if you purchased it via the Mac App Store):

cd /Applications/Twitterrific.app/Contents/Resources
 
# Backup menubar icons
for i in `ls | grep status_o`; do cp $i $i.bak; done
 
# Overwrite blue icons
for i in `ls | grep -e "^status_on.*tif$"`; do yes | cp `echo $i | sed 's/on/off/'` $i; done

If you also want to disable the activity animation:

cd /Applications/Twitterrific.app/Contents/Resources
 
# Disable activity animation
for i in `ls | grep -e "^status.*working.*tif$"`; do yes | cp status_on.tif $i; done

If you followed the first step, you can revert:

cd /Applications/Twitterrific.app/Contents/Resources
 
# Revert all changes
for i in `ls | grep bak`; do yes | mv $i `basename $i .bak`; done

You’ll have to repeat these steps after every update.

Iconfactory, if you’re reading, please add this feature!  I love the official client’s ability to only turn blue on @mentions and DMs.  Your app does many things so much better, and this feature is the only thing I’ll miss.

And Twitter, shame on you.

Background

I was able to track down some of the actual package installer files for Elf and installed it on a machine with a fresh install of Mac OS X 10.6.6.  My testing was performed on that machine.  If you’d like a copy for your own more thorough evaluation, please get in touch with me.  For obvious reasons, I will not be posting it here.

What is Elf?

Elf appears simply to be adware with several software components.  Upon running the installer, I was immediately bombarded with the following.

Users of the machines that I removed Elf from reported more frequent advertisements popping up, or even not being able to use the web browser at all.  I didn’t experience this, but I only used my infected test machine for a few hours.  Notice the toolbar right below the

address bar.  This is installed with Elf, somewhat “hacked” into Safari window.  In fact, if Safari was open before you installed Elf, you’d now see two copies of Safari in your Dock.

Some other lovely things that come with Elf are an “alert” menubar icon.  This icon seemed to only be present when Safari was open.

To go along with these alerts is an awful (oh, I mean “handy“) alert dialog, complete with close button on the wrong side of the window.

Clicking the icon dropped down a list of choices which displayed websites like the following “Privacy Policy” (not sure I believe it):

I also thought that Elf might be messing around with iCal due to the iCal icon looking very strange after installation and the fact that the Elf toolbar includes a calendar component.  I couldn’t find any evidence to back it up, but I’m not sure what else would cause what’s pictured below.  You’ll see below that the iCal icon’s font is different.  After launching iCal, the font was fixed, but the strange font would come back on reboot.

How did I get it?

No one I’ve talked to seems to know how it got installed on their system.  Judging from the .pkg files, it looks like they were downloaded via drive-by.  The only problem with this is that Elf installs files to areas of your Mac that require administrative access.  This means at some point you authorized the installation with an administrator username and password!

Update: A commenter suggested people have downloaded this by clicking a fake download link while trying to download Mac software.  This might be a picture of such a fake download link.

What does it do?

I used the utility fseventer from fernLightning as well as the contents of the .pkg files I acquired to track file system usage after the installation.  The files I noticed touched by Elf are listed in the “uninstall instructions” section below.  The toolbar portion is actually a product (a “Community Toolbar (ct)”) from Conduit.  I’d imagine the different toolbars could have different portions of malcode, but the uninstall steps should be the same since they’re based off the same product.

Some scripting additions and a system LaunchAgent are installed in addition to the pieces you’ve seen above.  The toolbar itself is actually an InputManager (“one of the simplest and most popular ways to load arbitrary external code into other applications” — cocoadev.com).  There are good InputManagers (most notably those from Unsanity), but they routinely cause instability with the OS in my experience.

Other than install a bunch of garbage and occasionally pop up ads, Elf didn’t really seem to do too much in my tests.  The Conduit LaunchAgent sat in the background, so even if you killed it, launchd would open it right back up (by design).  I did notice outbound connections to various flash game, online radio, and ad websites with every new Safari window opened.  There was at least one connection per window.  Using Wireshark, I was also able to see that Google Analytics code was being downloaded every so often as well.  I did not notice any personal information being sent out, though that’s not to say there wasn’t any (again, if you’d like a copy for your own evaluation, let’s get in touch).

How do I get rid of it?  (Uninstall Instructions)

Oddly enough, the program does come with a utility called “uninstall.”  I didn’t try it out until I had manually uninsalled it though, so I’m not sure what it does.  I didn’t feel like doing another fresh install of OS X to find out.

Here’s what I did to uninstall.  Run these commands in the Terminal (Applications > Utilities > Terminal).  As always, be careful with sudo commands.  If you don’t know what you’re doing, ask someone who does.  Quit all programs first to be on the safe side.

rm -rf ~/Library/Application Support/Conduit
launchctl unload -w -S Aqua /Library/LaunchAgents/com.conduit.loader.agent.plist
sudo rm -rf /Library/Application Support/Conduit
sudo rm -rf /Library/LaunchAgents/com.conduit.loader.agent.plist
sudo rm -rf /Library/InputManagers/CTLoader
sudo rm -rf /Library/ScriptingAdditions/ct_scripting.osax
sudo rm -rf /Applications/Toolbars

That should do it, you might want to reboot for good measure afterwards, but you shouldn’t have to. Remember to always think before authorizing a program with an administrator username and password.  Ask yourself why that particular program needs your password, and don’t provide it if you can’t figure it out.  Never run a program that you don’t know where it came from.  You might also want to not allow Safari to automatically launch files after download.  Remember, no operating system is invulnerable to attack and you are your own best defense.

When I was young, I lived near a railroad.  Whenever we heard a train coming, we would run to see it.  We would try to get the engineer to blow the whistle.

I tried to imagine what I would have thought if I had heard the term “Software Engineer” when I was little.  To me, an engineer was a person who drove a train.  Therefore, I guess a Software Engineer would be a person who drives a soft train.

I have been giving these toy trains out to my students since 1987.  More than being a “soft train for software engineers,” these trains remind us of some of the important software engineering principles.

The first thing you notice is that the sponges (which are shaped like train cars) are inside little gelatin capsules.  This, of course, reminds us of encapsulation.

If you dissolve the capsules in warm water, the sponges will emerge.  You can hook the sponges together to form a train.  This illustrates the principle of well-defined coupling between components.

A train is made up of a collection of cars.  This is the application of modularization.  Each car has its own purpose.  Different cars have different purposes.  This is the principle of cohesion.  Furthermore, you will find it very difficult to pull one of these cars apart, or put two of them together (except at the defined interfaces).  Each car has very strong cohesion.

When you look at a real train, you can’t really see inside the boxcars or tank cars.  The only way you know what’s inside is to read the label on the outside.  This is the principle of information hiding.

I thought this was just great, a nice little gimmicky real-world example that drives home a ton of concepts.  Maybe it’s a little low-level for graduate students, but it’s still good, and even better that it’s original.  If I ever teach computer science high schoolers or undergrads one day, I will definitely use this.

You can tell a professor who really cares about what he’s teaching when they think of brilliant examples.  I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.  Thanks Sam!

(Hook)
Poppin’ bottles in the ice, like a blizzard

I know what poppin’ bottles means, but why are you doing it in the ice?  I guess popping ice cold bottles or pouring bottles on ice doesn’t have a really nice ring to it.  Anyway, fine, I’ll give you that ice is like a blizzard and it fits your syllable strategy.  Or wait, are you putting bottles in the freezer?  That’s the opposite of drinking.  (Update: This could mean placing a bottle of champagne into a bucket of ice, which actually…makes sense.)

When we drink, we do it, right gettin slizzard

Good call, taking a word that approximately no one uses to define being drunk, so that you can later claim being the originator AND rhyme with blizzard!  Great start guys!

Sippin’ sizzurp in my ride, like Three 6

I hope you guys weren’t ever trying to be role models.  ”Sizzurp” (aka “purp” and “drank”) is prescription cough syurp mixed Sprite or vodka and candy flavoring.  People die from it all the time.  If Lil Wayne speaks out against it, you know it’s gotta be bad.

Anyway, this line is nothing more than the title of a Three 6 Mafia single, so creativity–.

Now I’m feelin’ so fly, like a G6

This is where I lose it.  This is the hook of your song, the catchy part, the part people remember and repeat over and over, and you rhymed “six” with “six.” You can’t do that.

Like a G6, like a G6

And again.

Now I’m feelin’ so fly, like a G6

Ahhh!  Seriously, stop!

But here’s what really gets me.  You’d think the “G6″ they refer to is a plane, since they get so “fly,” but it isn’t.  The “G” line jets (Gulfstream) tops out right now at G5.  The G6 is being planned but there still a ways off.  In an interview, the group says they’re referring to a Pontiac G6, a car!  A Pontiac spokeswoman confirmed to me that no Pontiac models currently can fly and there are no clear plans to have flying Pontiacs anytime soon.

Even then, the female wears airplane earrings in the music video and the male rappers make jet-taking-off gestures to the camera constantly.  These guys have a Gulfstream 4, probably knew they couldn’t afford the 5, figured out that “six” rhymed with “six” …  the rest is history.

(Verse 1)
Gimme that Mo-Moet
Gimme that Cry-Crystal

Those are various types of expensive alcohol.  Standard name dropping here.

Ladies love my style, at my table gettin’ wild
Get them bottles poppin, we get that drip and that drop

When you spend several hundred dollars on a bottle of liquor, I also suggest you get every last drop.  Is that what you mean?

Now give me 2 more bottles cuz you know it don’t stop

Right, if you keep ordering, it won’t stop.  These guys are brilliant.

(Bridge 1)
808 hell yeah

More shenanigans?  Name dropping again, this time with the famous Roland TR-808 drum machine…but, there are absolutely no 808 samples in your song Far East Movement, so what gives?  The few percussive sounds are definitely not from an 808 and everything else is from a synth.  Correct me if I’m wrong…  (Update: kurt suggests this might refer to the Hawaii area code, though the group is based in California.)

Drink it up, drink-drink it up,
When sober girls around me, they be actin’ like they drunk

Actually, that might be you perceiving them to be drunk.  I’ve never ever heard of a sober girl liking a drunk guy.  Just saying…

They be actin like they drunk, actin-actin like they drunk
When sober girls around me actin-actin like they drunk

Now, not only did you rhyme the next to lines with the same word again, but you filled the rest of the “verse” with the start of the stanza.  Way to pad the song folks.

(Hook)
(Verse 2)
Sippin’ on, sippin’ on sizz, Im’a ma-make it fizz

“Sizz”-urp?  The same stuff you mentioned in your hook?  Well let’s hope you didn’t mean freebased heroin.  Anyway, it’s the carbonation in the Sprite that’s making it fizz, so if you don’t drink it, it’s going to go flat.

Girl, I keep it gangsta, poppin’ bottles at the crib
This is how we live, every single night

George Thorogood, anyone?  No, just me?  Okay.  Well, fine, you can buy expensive liquor for your house.  I’m jealous, I can’t say anything negative here then…

Take that bottle to the head, and let me see you fly

Role models!

(Bridge 1)

(Hook)

(Bridge 2)
It’s that 808 bump, make you put yo hands up
Make you put yo hands up, put yo, put yo hands up
You can’t Touch this

It’s not an 808!

(Bridge 2)

(Bridge 2)

(Hook)

That’s all?  That’s the end?  You went for a whole 4 minutes and rhymed a total of four words.  Really, go back and count them (blizzard, crystal, drop, and ‘sizz’).

Anyway, I’m not one to step on success.  I’m all for small time artists making it big.  Really, I am.  I wish these guys all the success in the world.  But please, really, let’s get back to respecting the music.  I hate that songs like this (plus anything by Ke$ha, et al.) get popular when there are so many more creative songs written and produced by super-hardworking unsigned talent that will never get radio play.

What happened to music?

I’ve been working on a backend for a website and needed a way to show the latest Twitter update. There is plenty of code floating around that does this, but I couldn’t find anything simple that preserved formatting, like hyperlinks to @replies, e-mail addresses, URLs, etc. Anything that did was either very bulky (lots of source files) or required a Twitter API key…so I wrote my own, self-contained in a single function call.

As you can see, this just scrubs the HTML from Twitter.com, so it definitely could break without notice. That’s what you get for not using the official API, you should expect that.

function latest_tweet($username = 'gfiumara', $include_date = true)
{
        /* Grab the latest tweet in XML format */
        $twitter_feed_url = "http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/$username.xml?count=1";
        $feed_buffer = file_get_contents($twitter_feed_url);
 
        /* Use the tweet ID from XML to retrieve an HTML page with the tweet */
        try {
                $xml = new SimpleXMLElement($feed_buffer);
                $status = $xml->status;
        /* Twitter #failwhale */
        } catch (Exception $e) {
                return '<div id="tweet">@<a href="http://www.twitter.com/' . $username . '" target="_blank">' . $username . '</a>: <em>No tweet retrieved.</em>r</div>';
        }
        $single_tweet_url = "http://twitter.com/$username/status/$status->id";
        $html_buffer = file_get_contents($single_tweet_url);
 
        /* Strip out control characters */
        $html_buffer = preg_replace('/[\x00-\x1F\x7F]/', ' ', $html_buffer);
 
        /* Tweets are located in an 'entry-content' class span */
        preg_match('/<span class="entry-content">(?P<latest>.*?)<\/span>/', $html_buffer, $tweet_array);
 
        /* Add some additional formatting */
        $tweet = '<div id="tweet">@<a href="http://www.twitter.com/' . $username . '" target="_blank">' . $username . '</a>: ';
        if (isset($tweet_array['latest'])) {
                $tweet .= $tweet_array['latest'];
 
                /* Twitter uses relative links for @replies, etc. */
                $tweet = preg_replace('/href="\//', 'href="http://twitter.com/', $tweet);
 
                /* Insert the date */
                if ($include_date) {
                        /* Date is located in a 'published timestamp' span */
                        preg_match('/<span class="published timestamp" .*?>(?P<latest>.*?)<\/span>/', $html_buffer, $date_array);
                        if (isset($date_array['latest']))
                                /* Don't use HTML5 <time> because we're not guaranteed a valid time string */
                                $tweet .= '<a href="' . $single_tweet_url . '" target="_blank"><div class="time">' . $date_array['latest'] . "</div></a>";
                }
        } else
                $tweet .= "<em>No tweet retrieved.</em>";
 
        return $tweet . "</div>";
}

That said, this would be infinitely easier with jQuery or an HTML DOM Parser, but I really wanted it to be self-contained and completely PHP. You’ll need PHP 5 to use this code. If you’re stuck with PHP 4, you could simply rewrite the SimpleXML section with DOM XML or parse it with preg_match() like I do to get the date. You might want to preg_quote() the regular expressions Don’t use preg_quote() because it will escape characters you don’t want escaped (such as < and >).

If you see how this can be improved in any way or you spend the time to make it work for PHP 4, please leave a comment!