Amazon stuff

So, we had Amazon come for an info session recently, and I thought I would make a note of something they said before I forgot it. It's not on Wikipedia, but an Info Session is hardly citeable, and I thought the information should be recorded.

Anyway, they said Oprah is the hardest thing to predict for them. Christmas, etc. they have a lot of past sales data that gives them good ideas of how they're going to act.

One example they specifically referenced was the Kindle. Apparently after the Kindle got a huge recommendation on her show, they saw a big spike - but were mostly ready for that. So, they were all happy that they'd survived and predicted it so they could handle it. Then, it turned out that that spike was from one small market that got the show live or early or something. Apparently when the show hit the rest of the nation, they were absolutely shocked at the increases, sold out for a long time, orders of magnitude low in their predictions, etc.
Actually, google / the internet seems to bear out that Oprah's recommendation was indeed a very important moment in the Kindle's history.

They had to keep saying they couldn't give exact numbers, which seems to be a definite trend, even where it seems meaningless. My friends who worked at Google act similarly - I wonder if that's like the new thing to do in big tech company corporate policy.

C errors

So the error
Undefined symbols:
"_main", referenced from:
start in crt1.10.5.o
ld: symbol(s) not found
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [additional] Error 1

is pretty hard to understand. The main takeaway: you need a main function. Basically, you either forgot to include a main function, or you forgot to compile this alongside another file that does have a main function.

Life's busy

Some metrics you can use to tell quite how busy I am:
-Number of items on my desktop (both laptop and desktop)
-Number of unread emails in my GT inbox
-How many times I've checked my gmail/hotmail/junk accounts
-Size of my physical to-do pile in my room
-Whether I have time to replenish my Krispy Kreme breakfast stash
-Number of items ordered for myself online

All of these numbers are already skewed toward the crazy busy end of the spectrum, and I have at least 3 weeks of business left.

Wikia Search

Maybe Jimmy Wales just has a Reality Distortion Field as well, but I really think this Wikia search has the ability to beat Google in some key areas. I've already discovered a few searches that Wikia Search beats Google on, and I figured I'd write one down - dreamhost wiki. I needed to find their support wiki, and it wasn't even on Google's first page of results (although there were two sites with links to it), but it was Wikia Search's second result - behind Wikipedia, which I think is the "correct" way to order those results.

I encourage people to give it a shot - it's at least worth looking at and thinking about.

Dreamhost Bonnano

In case anyone was wondering, Bonnano is a quad Xeon system running at 2Ghz. Pretty speedy, although I am sure there are probably many users on it. It also looks like it might have 16GB of RAM. (Bonnano is the server that I'm on).

iPhotoToGallery Unknown error: 1001

So, I recently hit the error in the title of this post, and it took me a while to figure out what was wrong. I'm using dreamhost, and apparently people have had other issues resulting in this error in the past. However, in my particular case, the problem was that the user I was trying to use to login didn't have access to the root gallery. Gallery Remote also didn't properly display an error here; I figured it out by trial and error on another gallery and with different users.

So, if you have this problem, make sure the user you're logging in as has access to the base gallery folder. To do this, login as an admin, then select edit permissions on your root folder (i.e. the one that you see when you first login). Add the ability to add sub-albums and sub-items to that user's persmissions, and you should be good to go.

EyeTV issue + solution

If you've noticed that your live timeshifting in EyeTV is grayed out and it's saying "freeze frame" instead of pause when you pause the live TV feed, maybe this will help. I was having the same problem earlier today, and the problem was that I apparently accidentally disabled timeshifting in the device preferences. See this help article
to see a picture of where the setting is located.

Hopefully that helps if your timeshifting appears to be broken / no longer working / grayed out / otherwise disabled.

In between

Griffin support was once again amazing. Less than 3 minutes spent *total* to get another replacement shipped out. Also, no need to ship the old one back - maybe I'll use it for soldering or something. Very cool, though - I can't say I'm impressed with its reliability, but the service can't be beat.

The title refers to the fact that I have a lot of entires in the queue that may / may not be out soon.