BillDay.com

• Heavy thunderstorms two days after Christmas…weird! #

Apple has released the latest iPhone software update, version 2.2.

Among other things, this update adds several new Maps enhancements including Google Street View and sharing location via email and improves several key areas including email formatting, voicemail sound quality, and Safari Web browser performance.

During installation you are presented with the following “Important Information” for this release:

iPhone 2.2 Software Update

This update contains many bug fixes and improvements, including the following:
• Enhancements to Maps
- Google Street View
- public transit and walking directions
- display address of dropped pins
- share location via email
• Enhancements to Mail
- resolved isolated issues with scheduled fetching
of email
- improved formatting of wide HTML email
• Improved stability and performance of Safari
• Podcasts are now available for download in iTunes
application (over Wi-Fi and cellular network)
• Decrease in call set-up failures and call drops
• Improved sound quality of visual voicemail messages
• Pressing the Home button from any Home screen takes
you to the first Home screen
• Preference to turn on/off auto-correction in Keyboard
Settings

Products compatible with this software update:
• iPhone
• iPhone 3G

For feature descriptions and complete instructions, see the user guide for your iPhone at:
http://support.apple.com/manuals/iphone

For more information about iPhone, go to:
http://www.apple.com/iphone

To troubleshoot your iPhone, or to view additional support information go to:
http://www.apple.com/support/iphone

For information on the security content of this update, please visit this website:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222

• @timoreilly on the incredible power and importance of sensor-based interfaces and The Cloud for mobile users http://tinyurl.com/5e5yqo #

• At Tulsa TechFest Day 1, morning keynote by Chris Bernard, Microsoft User Experience Evangelist; click here for slides #
• Standing room only at the TechFest morning keynote #
• Stunning revelation from Microsoft keynote: “We need to think about scale”. Wow. #
• Bernard: “UX is about making choices”; developers need to “be everywhere” #
• Bernard is pushing Silverlight, XAML, and designer-oriented tools #
• Bernard: “How people feel is the new black”#
• Bernard’s blog http://chrisbernard.blogs.com #
• Jayson Street’s waiting to start his “Google to Pwnag3 in 60 Minutes” session http://twitpic.com/faew #
• Jayson Street’s “fun job” http://stratagem-one.com #
• Street’s talk TOC http://twitpic.com/fah9 #
• Street: Back Track 4 will be a Debian distribution http://tinyurl.com/3dg2zs #
• Street can’t get his Windows movie to play… #
• Street: “Hackers love complexity” (speaking of FoxNews.com and Fox.com using different OSes and web servers) #
• Street shows Firefox hacking extensions, using Netcraft.com and SamSpade.org #
• Street: OSVDB is an invaluable tool for sysadmins and defenders #
• Street: “Microsoft provided us with a hacking tool, tftp.exe. Lovely!” #
• Street’s presentation is at http://f0rb1dd3n.com/s1s/WP/ #
• Coming up after lunch in Track 1: Chris Koenig, Microsoft Evangelist, on Silverlight style http://twitpic.com/fb0l #
• Tim Elrod’s “Reverse Engineering Security Patches”: Most RE hackers use IDA Pro #
• Elrod talks very well of Metasploit, as did Street #
• Elrod shows how to reverse engineer a QuickTime RTSP vulnerability #
• Elrod uses VMWare Fusion extensively during his QuickTime RTSP exploit #
• Koenig’s Silverlight talk is sparsely attended and a bit of a snoozer http://twitpic.com/fbig #
• My “Hacking the Meaning in Human Communication” talk went well, two or three possible new partners #
• Rob Howard, CEO of Telligent and former Microsoftie, keynoting about the importance of talking *with*, not *at*, customers #
• Howard: “Search has to become much, much smarter”. Talk to Digital Reasoning, Rob! http://twitpic.com/fce0 #
• Howard: “Webkinz is brainwashing our children”. Love it! http://twitpic.com/fcgc #
• Howard demoing Telligent’s Harvest Reporting Server analytics tool #
• Overheard during Zune giveaway: “What’s that?”. Answer: “Like an iPod” #
• Tulsa TechFest suggestion for next year: Seriously streamline the giveaways at the end of each day (madness and mayhem and 45 minutes to get through them on Day 1 this year) #

Tulsa TechFest is this week, Thursday and Friday October 9th and 10th.

Two cans of food or two dollars gets you in each day (donated to charities in either case). There are a ton of interesting speakers and topics planned (click here to access the complete agenda).

I’m speaking on the Synthesys Platform and especially its Java API in a talk entitled “Hacking the Meaning in Human Communication” on Thursday afternoon at 2:30PM in the Java track.

The abstract for my talk is below.

Most text is not structured to help you find critical concepts and connections. Important knowledge is often buried deep in the text in mounds of irrelevant data. And unfortunately, keyword search, topical filtering, and tagging technologies don’t solve this problem because they require you to know what you’re searching for in advance.

The Synthesys Platform, however, helps you find unexpected, critical knowledge hidden in your data. Synthesys takes unstructured text as input, uses entity extraction with strong semantic relationship analysis to operate on the input, and then outputs abstracted knowledge objects. You can then use these objects (people, places, connections, etc.) to understand and analyze what’s important.

The Synthesys Platform is available both as a hosted service exposed via REST and a downloadable engine with SDK and Java API. This session introduces the Synthesys Platform including its core engine and SDK, then dives into using the APIs to build synthetic applications.

Watch my blog and Twitter stream (search for ‘tulsatechfest’) for live updates from the conference. Hope to see you there!

• Yahoo Finance piece on Congress approving the Bailout, Bush signing it http://tinyurl.com/4byljy #

• Blow-by-blow on the House voting down the Bailout http://tinyurl.com/537exc #
• A better Bailout idea? http://tinyurl.com/4c7v6d #
• Intrigued by the possibilities of helping family via Crossloop http://tinyurl.com/3uaffw #
• Another WWD Crossloop piece http://tinyurl.com/66mrc7 #
• Find me on Crossloop http://www.crossloop.com/billday #

• Henry Blodget on the contents of the Bailout Bill http://tinyurl.com/4omezn #
• Best topo map interface for Google Earth, 2+ yrs and counting http://tinyurl.com/yr6sp2 #

Missed something or want to revisit the first US Presidential debate held last week?

Watch it (possibly again) via Hulu. (Weird aside: When I launched it in Hulu, it was “brought to me with limited commercial interruption by Hungry-Man“…bizarro world!):

SNL had their own take on the debate, of course:

• Thank you, Oregon State. Sorry USC. Boomer Sooner! #
• Obama hates the 1st Amendment as much as the 2nd. Maybe the entire Bill of Rights? http://tinyurl.com/44wox9 #

• Kentucky’s excellent elk recovery and conservation efforts including hunting http://tinyurl.com/4z7u77 #

What a day for a 500th post to my blog. Given all that’s going on in Washington, I think I’ll keep it short and to the point:

500! Whoo hoo! Now back to worrying about economic doom and gloom and all of that good stuff…

• Watching US financial bailout Senate hearing and hoping those that made the very bad decisions don’t get off scott free #

• Electrons finally sorted out the 2001 Anthrax mail attacks http://tinyurl.com/4b8blq #

• Decide for yourself just what Obama would do to our 2nd Amendment if he had the votes in Congress http://tinyurl.com/4lpxp6 #
• Obama: Destruction of our Bill of Rights that You Can Believe In (TM) #
• Obama’s gun ban politics are clear http://tinyurl.com/4y42dp #
• Top Clinton fund-raiser backs McCain http://tinyurl.com/4wq26b #
• Obama would be the most anti-2nd Amendment President in US history http://gunbanobama.com/ #
• John Robb is worth reading http://tinyurl.com/5tuby5 and http://tinyurl.com/4qby9u #
• Web 2.0 Expo NYC presentation slides http://en.oreilly.com/webexny2008/public/schedule/proceedings #
• Gigaom “Mobilize” conference live stream http://events.gigaom.com/mobilize/08/Watch #

• Inside the iPhone App Store acceptance process http://tinyurl.com/6l9tzu #
• How Apple can really take advantage of iPhone location data http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/09/apple-location-chance-iphone-gps.html #
• “Bad Finance 101 - A Programmer’s Guide” http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2008/09/why-programmers-should-be-watc.html #
• Charles Scwhab on how the financial crisis may affect you http://tinyurl.com/4tf9yn #

• Wired examines Better Place’s plan to electrify auto transport http://tinyurl.com/65t8mg #
• Congrats to Russell Beattie on his new Nokia position
  http://tinyurl.com/6y5p48 #

• Ended up with 4in of rain from Hurricane Ike, now sunny and cool #

• Exploring the many and wondrous iPhone soc-net apps #
• Looking for a way to automatically propagate tweets to my LinkedIn status… #
• Jazzed about attending and speaking at TechFest http://techfests.com/Tulsa/2008/default.aspx #

Apple has released the latest iPhone software update, version 2.1. Among other things, this update addresses many of the iPhone 3G call drop and performance issues reported by users in the last couple of months.

During installation you are presented with the following “Important Information” for this release:

iPhone 2.1 Software Update

iPhone version 2.1 contains many bug fixes and improvements, including the following:
• decrease in call set-up failures and call drops
• significantly improved battery life for most users
• dramatically reduced time to backup to iTunes
• improved email reliability, notably fetching email from POP and Exchange accounts
• faster installation of 3rd party applications
• fixed bugs causing hangs and crashes if you have lots of 3rd party applications
• improved performance in text messaging
• faster loading and searching of contacts
• improved accuracy of the 3G signal strength display
• repeat alert up to two additional times for incoming text messages
• option to wipe data after ten failed passcode attempts
• Genius playlist creation

For feature descriptions and complete instructions, see the user guide for your iPhone at:
http://www.apple.com/support/manuals/iphone

For more information about iPhone, go to:
http://www.apple.com/iphone

To troubleshoot your iPhone, or to view additional support information go to:
http://www.apple.com/support/iphone

For information on the security content of this update, please visit this website:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222