Republicans: A betrayal of trust 

Excellent ad. They picked up the "betrayal" theme from the General Betray Us ad, and addressed the Republican's objections, by directing the betrayal theme at an obvious "Washington politician," Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. It'll be interesting to see how the Republicans vote next time. Not claiming they read my advice, but it's almost exactly what I asked for, and I think it'll work well.

If you like the ad, give MoveOn money to run more ads.

Apple updates iPhone. Legal, unhacked phones become bricks? 

According to Saul Hansell at the NY Times, Apple intends to break phones that have been unlocked.

But Francine Hardaway and Patrick Scoble both updated this afternoon, and bad things happened. Hardaway's phone was "fried," she needed a new phone, and Scoble lost all his data.

Hardaway: "Trust me, I didn't hack it."

Jeff Clavier: "This effing piece of s..t is bricked."

Robert Scoble, Patrick's dad, updated successfully, and got the new features. Scoble has guts.

Spaley's iPhone is now "a useless piece of crap."

Looks like Josh Bancroft's iPhone was hosed too. I would hold off on the update until we find out what's going wrong.

Sugar Attack: "It wasn't until I saw a friend tweet about the new iPhone firmware upgrade that I realized I could now access the iTunes WiFi store."

Twitter is taking a shower tonight 

I love Twitter, but there have been a lot of problems, and this is too much. They're taking it down tonight, for two hours, and we're hot on a big story, and it's developing -- on Twitter.

This seems like a bad night for Twitter to go to sleep. (But there probably never is a good night.)

I don't think the Twitter guys really understand how much we're doing with their service.

It's been going down a lot lately. And while other people have been complaining about it losing posts, I had never seen it lose one, until yesterday, and now it's losing them regularly, for me too.

Read the first three words of this post again.

They raised $5 million, it seems now it's time for them to get the bugs out, hire some people who really understand scaling, if necessary re-implement the system from the ground up. Do whatever is needed to make it as reliable as the other tools we depend on. We need Twitter to work. It's not a fun experiment for us, we're using it.

Jack, Ev, Biz, Fred -- please take note.

Postscript: The announcement changed, now they're saying it'll be down on Sunday night. Much better. Thanks!

Good morning Internet! 

An interesting discussion popped up on Flickr under the picture of the N800, which arrived yesterday. I'd like to get to the bottom of the problem and get it working. What I really want to know is if there's an Apache running on the device. If so, can the camera drop pictures into the htdocs folder? Can I record a podcast? Will it drop the MP3 file into the htdocs folder? We may just have to wait for Bug Labs to get the user programmable hand-held, but after a night of sleep, last night's failure is fading out and a teeny bit of enthusiasm is returning. But first I have to go to breakfast and do a couple of meetings.

Postscript: Apache for the N800.

Postscript: The N800 works at a local Internet cafe. I was able to browse the web and make a Skype call.

Finally: This thread had the answer... I have it running with no security, but it works, with the settings tweaked as indicated in the thread. I will have to get it working with security, but for now, I am able to connect.