Jerome's TOTs

One of the neat features of Halo 3 is that it takes a movie of your campaign or multiplayer sessions. By going to the Halo 3 theater, you can edit and make some movies and/or take snapshots. You can download your snapshots from the Bungie Halo 3 Web site.

Here are a few snapshots I took of two new cool weapons.

The Flamethrower

The Gravity Hammer

For when you really don’t want to say what you’re really doing…

Since I can’t seem to update my blog often enough, I thought of introducing a new column.

Between posts with a bit more substance, I will try to add some noise to my blog by writing some Napkin Status updates.

As a regular Facebook user that regularly update his status, I often wonder what to write. I don’t feel like always writing the same thing. Sometimes, I haven’t much more to say than I am at work, I am at home, etc.

The Napkin Status Update will try to offer an alternative for when you have nothing particularly important to say in your status.

I must credit Hugh MacLeod from the gapingvoid as an inspiration for the concept.

So, without much fuss, here’s my Napkin Status Update #1.

I’m developing a Facebook application for fun in my free time and found the solution to a problem that nagged me for a while.

To develop a Facebook application, you use the Facebook Developer application and create a new application. You can even define a localhost application so that you can debug your application locally. Once all the required parameters are well defined for you application and you begin to test the Facebook integration, you may encounter the following error when following you Canvas Page URL:

When this was happening to me, my application wasn’t being called at all by Facebook. If you have a real error in your application, your application should be called and you should be able to debug it or you should be at least getting a 404 error from your server.

The solution

With trial and error, incomprehension and a lot of swearing, I finally found out that this is a bug in Facebook and pinpointed exactly how it happens for me.

Ensure that the Canvas Page URL and that your Side Nav URL are both in lowercase! There is something in the Facebook folks code that forbids you to add any uppercase letters to the Canvas Page URL and Side Nav URL. So, to be on the safe side, for every URL defined in your application’s settings in Facebook, use lowercase letters!

By the way, it now looks like this problem is now specific to the Side Nav URL being in lowercase. I am pretty sure that there was a similar Facebook error when the Canvas Page URL was in uppercase.

I’ll give it to Steve Jobs and Apple, they’ve done it again with their new iPod Touch!

I’ll also give it to The New York Times, who resumed in a few words, in their “Apple Reactions: The Future of Wireless Audio and Video” article, what I wouldn’t be able to say in less than a paragraph:

.the most significant aspect of all this is the emergence of a class of portable computer that can surf the Web

Another thing of note in this article:

The Starbucks gimmick may be the start of something important too. Take your iPhone or iPod Touch into a Starbucks store and it will add a new button to the front screen. Push it and it will tell you what song is playing in that store and allow you to buy the track. Starbucks can be first with this sort of application because it is already wired for Wi-Fi, and the music application is a natural. But of course your phone or other wireless device will start to ping you with information – wanted or otherwise – as you move through the commercial world. Vendors have been talking about wireless coupons, etc, for years, but  here it starts.

It’s really interesting to note that with a simple and limited marketing gimmick like the Starbucks gimmick, Apple shows everyone how to intelligently do wireless commerce. Who hasn’t asked the question “what’s that song playing now”? Well, now (at Starbucks with an iPod), you instantly get the answer to your question and you can buy the song. By showing an elegent way to answer simple questions, Apple is showing the way to go. I see that as an important marketing test, which I’m sure, will have other partners rushing at Apple’s door soon enough. Is the iPhone the new mobile commerce platform of choice?

Back to the device. So, if you want to browse the Web wirelessly, no need to buy an iPhone that cannot be easily activated without an AT&T plan. You just need a new iPod. As you can see with the above article, this brings a lot of possibilities. With the Safari browser, you now get a new wireless development platform starting at 299$ with an ever increasing user base.

As a user, you can now browse the Web, watch Youtube online videos or keep in touch with friends on a customized Facebook interface.

I see a lot of interesting uses for businesses too. If your warehouse is Wi-Fi enabled, you could make Intranet apps for this new device. Possibilities are endless.

For more information regarding differences between the iPhone and the iPod Touch, I recommend reading: “Differences between the iPhone and iPod Touch“.

What’s next?

With the iPhone, the problem always as been, at least in America, the mobile provider lock-in. With the direction Apple is taking, what stops them from developing a new version of iPod Touch with a microphone and speaker so you can make Internet phone calls à la Skype, the wiPhone?

I also hope they’ll soon add a GPS to both the iPhone and the iPod Touch. This will bring tons of features to local 2.0 applications and social networking.