Quoted in an article about Facebook

I was quoted in an article on digitaltrends.com:

WE ASKED, YOU ANSWERED: WOULD YOU ACTUALLY PAY FOR FACEBOOK?

“There is no way I would pay for Facebook. I’m already uncomfortable being on the network, but I have an account because it’s what everyone uses to share what is going on. I had actually deleted my account, but after hearing that a friend was in the hospital from someone else who saw it on Facebook, I gave in and opened up a new account … [and] an ad-free Facebook is not enough of a selling point to get people to pay. If someone wants to eliminate ads, they can easily do it with browser extensions like AdBlock, Social Fixer, Greasemonkey scripts, etc.” – Blake Swopes, BhodiSoft

It also looks like my quora answer about the craziest thing I ever said in a job interview also got quoted over on the Jobberman blog:

What’s the Craziest Thing You Ever Said (or Did) in an Interview and Still Got The Job?

iTunes Repeated Password Prompts

I’ve recently been struggling with an issue where iTunes repeatedly prompts for the iTunes store password. There are some forum threads out there that address the issue, but in my case it went beyond the common solutions. I wanted to call out the steps to look for.

This was particularly troubling to me, since I have arthritis; typing any more than I need to can be very painful at times. Also, secure passwords can be a bit awkward to type, since they aren’t normal words.

    • Cookies
    • Keychain
  • Multiple Accounts

So, one of the first things to check is your cookie preferences in Safari. iTunes shares the same cookie storage as Safari and the same restrictions, so if you don’t accept cookies, then you’re going to have trouble. Open up Preferences > Privacy and make sure that your cookie preferences are set to anything other than Always.

Your keychain could be corrupt. Open up Keychain Access, then bring up preferences and “Reset my default keychain”. This will blow away a bunch of saved passwords, so you might want to think about this one first.

Finally, the issue that was causing my trouble. I had purchases under multiple iTunes account. I used Doug’s “Track Down Purchases” applescript to identify what was under my old account and see if it was worth really hanging on to. In my case, it wasn’t, so I purged the files from my old account. Depending on what you have, you can also see about using iTunes match to switch files you own over to your other account. Get iTunes match under your current account, make sure the files from your old account are matched, delete them then download them from iCloud. Bonus is that you’ll probably get better quality copies without DRM.

Good luck!

Kiva Country Collector – Python scripts on GitHub

I’ve been a Kiva.org lender for a while, and I always try to pick up new countries when they’re available… KivaLens has been giving me trouble, though, so I started writing something myself against the kiva api.

You can find (and contribute code to) the project over on github at: https://github.com/bswopes/kiva-country-collector

$ ./kiva-loans.py -i bswopes
User ID: bswopes
No new countries found. Looking for less used countries.
Found 1 loans for country ALBANIA
Country ALBANIA, previous loan count 2

June 18, 2009

Strange moment during physical therapy today. I was rubbing my shoulder and the girl asked me what was up. Told her it hurt… blah blah… and I decided to just get on with my exercises so I made what I thought was a dismissive comment; I said “eh, everything hurts” *shrug*.

She didn’t take it as lightly as I meant though.

“That’s so sad.”

Wait, it is?

I’m always in pain… Isn’t everyone?

[EDIT: James informs me that in fact, no, its not supposed to hurt.]

Welcome to the ORIGINAL BhodiSoft.com! Coding since '96, on the web since '00. Accept no substitutes!