For years, digivation.net has been proud to bring you excellent technical content, the best of the web, and a candid view into the lives of it’s editors. Writing and maintaining this site has brought us immeasurable joy over the past five years and it is with heavy hearts that we must say goodby and close this chapter of web history.

Yesterday, the [team application][1] for an iPhone developer account was finally approved. I paid my portion of the fee, the team lead configured my account, and I was off to the races. Since I plan on using the iPhone OS 3.0 beta more for daily use and less for developing, I plan on keeping a log of my experiences as well as any tips and tricks I discover along the way. I also plan on making a long overdue update to the [OTA iPhone Calendar Sync][2] post with all current methods and their benefits/drawbacks. I might even get around to finishing up and posting a few other iPhone related things while I’m at it.

Just in case you missed it, Apple [announced][1] the latest OS for the iPhone (and iTouch), [version 3.0][2], on Tuesday. It includes a ton of new features, mostly in the programming department (though copy and paste will be a welcome addition, as will the new MMS feature … no more viewmymessage.com texts!). The OS will be open to consumers in June, but is currently avaliable for registered developers (must be a paid developer, not a free one). Me, being totally impatient about this, was twittering about the OS upgrade and recieved an offer to go in on a dev team and split the cost of membership. This will give me (legal) access to the 3.0 beta OS, the 3.0 SDK, and the ability to test any software I write on the phone itself.

I’ve really been enjoying [Google Chrome][1], the web browser created by Google which features the “blazingly fast” V8 JavaScript engine. To show off the features of the JS engine, they’ve created a site called [Chrome Experiments][2] (via [Google Blog][3]). There’s some really cool stuff there (check out the [Browser Ball][4] demo), but I think my favorite is [Ball Pool][5]… it’s fun and it makes cool looking paterns! There’s also a few neat 3D demos.

An oldie but a goodie, Marcus Ranum’s “[Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security][1]” are a great read. I think my favorite is #2, “Enumerating Badness.”

Google Latitude is both extraordinarily useful and superbly useless.

Normal People do their resolutions before the beginning of the new year. I do mine much later. Without further ado:

Yesterday was, by even the most humble estimates, a monumental day in history (let’s leave arguements of good/bad at the door, k thx bye). Always the optimist, I feel that changes are quite needed and I’m always seeing the best in the opportunity.

This morning’s purusal of the interwebs presented me with a particularly interesting gem: a good [article about MP3 decoding][1]. It’s written with a nice overview of the format and builds up to a limited but functional bit of code that can actually decode an MP3. Even if you aren’t into programming, I’d recommend skimming it, as it’s nice to know more about something so commonplace but usually never given a second thought.

[Merry Christmas from the Guys of the hQ][1] from [Matthew Smith][2] on [Vimeo][3].

Well it seems that here we are, stuck smack-dab in the center of the “holiday season,” for all its’ joy and consumerism. Of course, financially this is shaping up to be one of the worst holiday seasons in the past seven, twenty-five, or seventy-eight years, depending upon where and on what day you get your news. Many, including myself, are predicting fiscal gloom for the next several months at the least. But no worries, its’ still the holidays and there are always lots of things one can be happy, thankful, or at least non-suicidal about.

Random, I know, but I recently ran across a site with [pictures of recent wrecks][1] around New York. I really wish something like this existed for the local area.

Life after college goes in a few directions depending on the person, examples of which I’ve witnessed through my fellow post-graduation friends. Some people take the marriage route, getting hitched a few months, weeks, or days after graduation. Others get jobs, move into apartments by themselves, and do the single life thing (or have girlfriends that visit on the weekends). Still others move back in with their parents where they can use their newfound college smarts to think about ways of making their shiny new diploma profitable. Many people who fall into these categories also stop going to the gym, or start overeating, or something, and end up getting “out of shape,” so to speak. Then of course there’s those people that go to grad school or med school or pharmacy school, but they don’t count.

[][1]A few days ago, a friend asked me a few questions about [related rates][2] problems. They are currently trying to get a better understanding of the concepts being taught in their calculus class, and knowing that I have a degree in engineering (automatically making me a math expert), they assumed that I would be able to offer immediate help and provide vast amounts of understanding and insight.

When I was a sophomore in college, Facebook was in its first iterations. I remember the day that Facebook added “Mercer University” to its list of supported colleges; everyone was talking about it and I had no idea what Facebook was – but I went and signed up. I can proudly say I was one of the first members of Facebook’s Mercer network.

Just a quick word of congratulations to my friend David on his recent acceptance of a job offer! Dave is a very talented engineer and will be graduating from LSU in December. It seems he had one of the best problems imaginable, especially given the current economy: he had too many job offers! At any rate if you see him, be sure to congratulate him on his accomplishments!

We’ve decorated headquaters for Halloween. It’s about as ghetto as it gets, but it’s all in good fun.

It’s late on a Friday afternoon and I’m watching the clock count down the last mintues of the day. Thankfully, I remembered my friends David and Jon keep their musings online (much like Chappie and myself, though Jon posts a lot more than Chappie). You should probably skip on over to [this link][1] and find out why you should eat an ape.

A couple of days ago, while eating at Zaxby’s with my roommates (a favorite dining location), conversation touched briefly the topic of “pirate radio.” The last time I discussed such things was in a series of conversations with Chappie last summer. We contrived a concept for a distributed radio transmission network using small, distributable, network connected transmitters which would be installed in several locations around an area and then controlled via the Internet. Transmission could be achieved via simultaneous activation of all transmitters for greatest power, or randomly switched between stations for stealth. Various other combinations of transmitter activation could attain directional fields or other interesting effects. Contrived mostly devised as an exercise to entertain our engineering minds (and the rebel within), we never proceeded beyond the concept stage.