Coherent Blahs

So, officially, the iPhone 4G is released, and according to Jobs, “it’s the biggest leap since the original iPhone”. But, where’s the beef?

Let’s see what iphone 4G brings us EXTRA:

1. Front facing Camera and videoconferencing: Well, it’s a neat feature, but not new. Android based Evo 4G already has a front facing camera, and Android has been supporting video chat for quite some time anyway.

2. External buttons, volume up and down, mute, front facing camera: Finally, FINALLY Apple realizes that that ALL soft buttons is not the best idea after all.

3.  Two mics for active noise cancellation: Heck, HTC had it for a long time. Even almost-obsolete Nexus 1 has this.

4. Gyroscope: Yes, this is definitely a new addition, and will be welcome by the gaming world. However, given it’s based on third party hardware, it’ll probably be on other phones within weeks. This is also an incremental addition, not really a “leap” I’d say.

5:  Retina Display: This, I think, is iPhone 4G’s biggest addition. But again, being third party, and hardware based, it’ll probably show up on other phones within weeks. This is also just an incremental addition.

On the software front, most of the stuff was declared with the iOS release, and Google had already upped the ante. Multitasking, Wallpapers were already there in Android.

So, let me ask again, where’s the beef… ahem… the leap?

Personally, I had expected WWDC to give us something better. Seems like Apple is now playing the catchup game, trying to sell front facing camera, multitasking etc. which have been on Android phones for some time now.

There are no MiFi mobile hotspots or free GPS navigation,  features already present in Android. Heck, with Froyo being deployed, Android users can now play all the games at Kongregate, watch all the videos (and not just the 75% of videos that Jobs wants iPhone users to watch), and do what THEY want, not what Jobs wants for them.

Related articles:

Showdown: iPhone 4 vs. HTC Evo 4G (wired.com)

Now, this is really weird. I was searching for one place to get the list of all the states so that I don’t have to type it up for something I’m writing, and look what I found.

Look at the Sponsored Link section. Bing is putting Ads on Google!!! Huh!!!

We have a vacation coming up next month, and I was wondering how to best use my Garmin nuvi 350 for the trip. It became more necessary since the accomodation we’ll be staying at will not have any Internet access (so, no access to Google Maps).

Google Maps have the nice feature where you can send a Point of Interest (POI) directly from Google maps to your Garmin GPS. However, it has a few shortcomings:

1. Garmin issue: It has only Windows XP (No Win2k) and MacOSX support. So, no Linux support. Bummer!! It’s not Google’s fault, since Garmin has not ported the plugin for Linux. This is a double bummer since Garmin now uses Linux in most of its GPS lines. Since they are getting so much commercial value from Linux, I’d expect them to give a little back and port their software for Linux.
2. Google Issue 1: Only the POIs that show up in the search of google maps can be sent to the GPS. No Custom placemarks can be sent. This is surprising since most GPS’s take co-ordinates for POIs, which is readily available in Google maps.
3. Google Issue 2: Either I am missing something, or Google just completely didn’t get it. There is no way to completely send a whole Saved Map to a Garmin (or any other GPS) device from Google maps. That’d mean, if you have a saved map with many placemarks, you’ll have to send them individually. It’s just not cool.

However, the best news is, there is a solution around all these issues. The steps to get this done are:

• Create a new Map in Google Maps. For this, click on My Maps:
• Then click on “Create new map”. Put a suitable name to your map:
• Now you can add placemarks, either by searching for them, or by right clicking and selecting “Add a placemark” anywhere in the map. The added placemarks for the map will show up on the left side:
• After all the placemarks have been added, get the link for your saved map. You can get the link from the top right corner:
• Then go to http://www.takitwithme.com/ and insert the Google Map link into the textbox. Click “Load MyMap” and TakeItWithMe will load all the placemarks from your Google Map.
• Click on the Download GPX button, and you should be able to save all the Google Placemarks as a .gpx file. This .gpx file can be converted into different GPS formats. In our case, we need to convert it to a .gpi format.
• For Windows users, you can use the POI Loader directly to load the GPX file into your Garmin GPS.
• For Linux users, the GPX file needs to be converted into GPI format, and manually loaded. For this, use gpsbabel. The command for converting it to the Garmin gpi format is:

gpsbabel -i gpx -o garmin_gpi -f Yellowstone.gpx -F Yellowstone.gpi

  Recently I was playing with couple of link scraping libraries, and was impressed by the simplicity of the mechanize toolkit. The only problem they have is lack of documentation.
  Following is an example script written in python that can do a google search and scrape the result links (of class ‘l’) in a few lines of code.

import re
import sys
from mechanize import Browser,DefaultFactory
import mechanize;

br = mechanize.Browser( factory=DefaultFactory(iwantbrokenxhtmlsupport=True))
br.addheaders = [ (“User-agent”, “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible)”) ]
br.sethandlerobots(False)

br.open(‘http://www.google.com/search?q=’+sys.argv[1])

def arrtonamed(arr):
        ret = {};
        for x in arr:
                ret[x[0]] = x[1];
        return ret;
# follow second link with element text matching regular expression
for link in br.links():
    hash = arrtonamed(link.attrs);
    if hash.has_key(‘class’):
            if (hash[‘class’] == ‘l’):
                print link.url+’[‘+link.text+’]’

A sample output for the script is:

$ python goog.py samya
http://www.thinkbabynames.com/meaning/0/Samya[Samya - meaning of Samya name]
http://www.samyatech.com/[SAMYA Technology : Green Power Expert! 祥業科技股份有限公司: 綠色 ...]
http://www.yawiktionary.com/s/1148371572412.html[samya - definition of samya - yawiktionary.com]
http://samya.indiangeek.com/[[ IndianGeek ] Welcome to Samya’s HomePage]
http://www.hossamramzy.com/stars/starsofegypt_samya.htm[The Stars of Egypt ® | Hossam Ramzy]
http://www.belly-dance.org/samia-gamal.html[Samya Gamaal - the queen of raqs sharki]
http://www.samya.ca/[Samya Therapies Splash Page]
http://samya-photography.deviantart.com/[Samya-Photography on deviantART]
http://www.facebook.com/people/Samya_Badraoui/1434855400[Samya Badraoui | Facebook]
http://www.healthgrades.com/directory_search/physician/profiles/dr-md-reports/Dr-Samya-Nasr-MD-EB461FD0.cfm[Dr. Samya Z. Nasr, MD, Pediatric Pulmonology, Pediatrics, located ...]