Sidewaysgravity Blog

Well it appears I have finally got a somewhat functional way to get google voice (text messaging) and my iPhone to play nice together. The best thing is that I have to a degree, a form of push notification for text messages.

Since I am writing this from my iPhone, I will try to make it brief.

1. You need a gmail account, preferably one that doesn’t get any email.

2. You need an iPhone with iOS 3+.

3. You need to be able to add a Microsoft exchange account onto your iPhone. I think in iOS 3 you only could add one but in iOS 4 you can add multiple.

From there all you need to do is set your google voice numbers to forward text messages, and voicemails for that matter to the gmail address in step 1. Also make sure to tell it not to send the text. It should be a checkbox for if it’s a mobile number. Just check no and it will only email and not text it to you. The purpose is to avoid using text you have to pay for.

Then you will just need to set up your gmail account as an exchange account mail.

Use the following link to set that up.

http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=138740

Once you have you email setup, you can set your options to enable push for your gmail. Anytime you receive a text message, it goes to your gmail which pushes it straight to your iPhone. On average there is about a 10-20 second delay from when it is sent and when I receive it.

But wait, how do you send messages you ask. There are two answers for that. First, the easy way to send a message is to reply directly in gmail inbox to the email/text. Google will figure it out and forward it on as a regular text message and the receiver will never tell a difference. Second, if you are initiating the text for the first time, unfortunately the only solution I have is to use the google voice web interface through safari. You can add an icon to your home screen to take you straight there to make the process easier, but after the first text it’s all handled though mail and super easy.

One last note, in email, it just shows the number and not the name. There is sort of a way to get around this although not fully tested. When you are viewing the actual email, the from address should be the phone number, if you click on it then it will show you the entire address which is a google voice address. You can select to add to an existing contact and then select who you want. This adds it as an potter field and then it will show the persons name when viewing the email.

The down side is that it still does not show the name when viewing the list of emails.

All in all I am loving the new setup. Would I give it up for a native google voice app? Yes. But for now, I get instant push notifications for all my google voice texts, I can easily reply, and I don’t have to pay for sending and receiving text messages. I will note that instead of text, it does use data, but so far and at least in my case it is much cheaper this way. Since I am not using fetch to constantly check mail and having it pushed instead.

Let me know if you decide to give it a try and how it works for you.

Happy texting.

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Over the past week a friend of mine has endeavored to increase his presence on the web with his blog. He decided to completely rework his blog from the ground up, geared toward better search engine optimization (SEO).

A big change that he has made is in the frequency of his postings which average 1-3 per day. Over the past week he has gone from a unknown page in google search to page one. Currently he has focused mainly on people who search his own name (Chris Keefer). It will be interesting to see how his blog continues to grow over the coming weeks and months and to see what other directions he will be focusing his SEO attentions.

If you would like to get a little idea of the inner workings of Chris, take a gander at his rebuild blog.

http://mynameisreef.com/

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If you are one of the users who has been trying to get into home recently, only to find out you need to update to 1.36 and while waiting for the download to start, your playstation instead decides to shut off, your in luck. Whew…

I have a fat ps3, you will notice that when you open up Home it will tell you that you need to upgrade. Dont press anything. On the lower side of your ps3 you will see the yellow Hard drive light flickering or on solid. You have to wait until it is no longer active before pressing (x). For me this took about 30 seconds or so. Once the light was off, the update worked perfect.

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I ran across this error the other day while setting up a nested foreach loop. When looking at the error logs all I found was expecting T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM. Which was not very helpful. If you find that you have this error, try looking for a missing dollar sign “$” on one of your variables.

Hope this helps, happy coding!

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The google analytics site went down today. Their is a quick and easy work around. It is really only the sign in page that is down right now.

Sign into regular old google.com. Once signed in, then type in the url google.com/analytics/reporting and you will be able to access your dash board.

Your Welcome!

Re-tweet or post a link to help get the word out!

Fix thanks to Colt…

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I came across the problem the other day of how to show a related entry of a reverse related entry of my entry. Confused? Imagine the following scenerio:

You have two separate weblogs, A and B. Each has several entries and are related to each other through a third weblog C. The weblog C holds all the relations and weblog A and B do not have any relations. This means that there can be many entries in C which point to A, and many entries in C that point to B. Still confused? Here is a real world example.

You have several lawyers who practice in a variety of practice areas but not necessarily all areas. The same relation is true for practice areas, where on area can have several attorneys but maybe not all. Each attorney has a statement about his expertise in the practice areas they serve in. In this example, the Lawyer is held in weblog A, the practice area in B and the statement of expertise in weblog C.

Now, lets say you would like to have an Lawyer page for a specific lawyer in weblog A, and you would like to list out all the practice areas (B) on the lawyers page. Because there is no direct relation between A and B you must use the relation between A – C and then the relation from C – B to get the final relation of A – B. To do this you must use a nested related entry in a reverse related entry for the entry of the Lawyer.

Unfortunately, expression engine does not allow nested related items on a page directly. So to make this work, you must use an embed to make the nesting work. Here is the code for the lawyer page:

{reverse_related_entries orderby=”title”}
<div class=”entry”>
{embed=”site/attorney_link” entry_id=”{entry_id}”}
<h3>{title} – {attorney}</h3>
<p>{about_bio}</p>
</div>
{/reverse_related_entries}

All of the above code would be held inside the {weblog:entries} tag for the specific lawyer. Now the code for the embedded file:

{exp:weblog:entries dynamic=”off” entry_id=”{embed:entry_id}”}
{related_entries id=”attorney”}<h4><a href=”{url_title_path=”attorney”}”>{title}</a></h4>{/related_entries} {/exp:weblog:entries}

The key to making the nested related entry work, is to use the embed method. This allows you to send the entry id of the outer reverse related into a separate page. On the new page, you can do a normal exp:weblog call searching for only that id that was passed through. This will then give you access to the post in the intermediary blog (C) and allow you to call a related entry for either A or B.

If you are still confused after reading this, send me a comment and maybe I can clarify a little further. While this may not be something you use everyday, it definitely can come in handy.

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First things first, the rumor is False. I received in my inbox the other day a message from a friend stating that on Sept. 12 and 13th that people should not play cod4 in protest to infinity ward for making exclusive map content available only on the xbox 360. While looking around for more information about it today I was glad to see that Infinity Ward has commented on this as being false. Now the only question is whether or not to buy the prestige mode game box for the night vision goggles…

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Today I had my first chance to look a little further into iTunes 9. There were two new features that seemed to draw my attention and so far have been a great addition to itunes.

First, the Home Space addition. Since my wife and I both have separate iTunes accounts and separate laptops, the Home Space feature has been a welcomed addition. To use this feature, just choose one of your itunes accounts and use it to create the home share on your computers. It is important to note that each computer you put on the home share, will use the same itunes account no matter which computer you are adding it on. So once you choose one, you will use it for all.

Second, the “fill free space with songs” on your ipod. This new option is found when you connect your ipod on the music page and will do as it says and fill up any remaining space on your ipod with additional songs from your library. This is very helpful in my case where I have over 30GB of music and only a 16GB iPod Touch. It is hard to create just enough playlists to fill up the space.

There are still other options that I am looking at, such as the genius for the app store but so far I have not had a chance to use it. Overall iTunes 9 is a welcomed update. It is taking a step that I hope all programs will start to make, which is bringing better sync between multiple machines.

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One game that has always called my attention has been Lair. It was an early release for the ps3 and got a lot of criticism for the controls and it really hurt the overall sales of the game. I heard that they eventually came out with a patch for the game that allowed players to use the analog sticks instead of using the 6 axis for flying. While I could not bring myself to pay the full price for the game; now years after the release it is pretty easy to pick up for less than $20 at any major game trading store. So finally I decided to pick up the game at Gamestop for only $15.

My first impressions of the game were good. Once I got my Y-Axis inverted and got used to the basic controls it seemed pretty simple. For one of the first games to come out on the ps3, the graphics of the game are pretty good too. Overall the game has a lot of potential. Although I only about half way done with the game, you can still see how the control structure is a major downfall to the game. You almost need someone who has played the game to sit beside you and tell you how and what to do. There have been a few times where I have spent all my lives playing a level, and only right before my last death, I finally figure out what it is I am supposed to do. The game will tend to be very detailed about what you should do, and then later say nothing at all. So you think, if its not obvious, they will tell me like they did before, so you wait and die, until you eventually find out they are not going to tell you.

It reminds me of playing some of the original tekken games against my older brothers. They knew all the combos and would always beat me, so my only chance was to pound the control and hit every button as hard and fast as I could and hope that one of them would work. With Lair, I find myself doing that a lot as well. My character will give me encouraging signs, confirming what I am doing is right (pounding all the buttons). I will say that with time I have begun to notice certain patterns to how to defeat enemies, and it is getting easier. But at the same time, I die a lot still and think that there are certain things that I am missing about the game, and that if only I knew what it was, I could do much better.

When I am not totally frustrated at the game, I do enjoy it. It still is fun to land in the midst of a large group of enemy infantry (R2 and L2) and burn, swipe and eat your occasional enemy. For $14.99, it is a pretty good game. Just take into account that it can be extremely frustrating at times, and you may not have a single clue as to what you are doing. I found it useful to watch some online videos and read up about the controls of the game. If your just starting the game and you cant figure out how to beat your enemy when you are flying along side him… just make a quick movement of the controller in the left or right direction… seems simple but it took me a while to figure out. If you can get the game for $10, I would say give it a try.

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When trying to run the migration I would get the following error/message on the new macbook pro (10.5)

There was an error connecting to the network, and the information on the other Mac couldn’t be accessed.

At the same time I would not be able to find the macbookpro from my current machine, and the only message I could find was in the log files stating “rtmsg: error writing to routing socket”

I worked on this issue for a couple hours and finally gave up. While the transfer works great if you have a firewire cable, I was not able to get the transfer to work over wifi. I have an airport extreme router as well, so you would think there wouldn’t be a problem with the network. I never got this issue resolved.

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