So it happened. I hoped it would take longer but I knew it would come. It was a sad and frustrating day the other week that I have only now wanted to or have been able to write about it.

A little background to set up the scene: I work at a university, we have a rather large system that is built on MOSS. Which in of itself isn’t a major problem but still proves to be an interesting challenge.

One of those challenges is to create a development environment that is available anonymously (not logged in) to the developers only on the local network. Pretty common in the Apache world and should be fairly easy to setup on the MOSS system (or so I thought). Well it turns out that it’s not overly easy, and currently can’t be done so that it is limited to the local network. Something with how they have the firewalls setup or something.

In order for the developers to work we needed anonymous access turned on so that we could test our code as how the rest of the world would see it. Now this really isn’t an issue because only people who are working on the server know the URL. Google doesn’t know about it, Joe Plumber doesn’t know about it and you anonymous person doesn’t know about it. However the server admin thought that Google would index it right away, and was confused about it because another development environment was already being indexed by Google (another story for another time). After I reassured him that: 1. Google wouldn’t index unless it knew about it, 2. We can make sure that Google won’t index it, and 3. I couldn’t work unless anonymous access was turned on. After going back and forth a little, he decided that he wouldn’t turn it on unless he got approval from him supervisor (out for the day) or from my supervisor (also out for the day).

What it comes down to it a lack of knowledge on his part and a lack of respect for my position. I’m pretty much an expert in SEO and things related to search engines. I can tell you I knew next to nothing about Windows servers and IIS, which is why I trust the people who hold those positions to do their jobs and hope that they also realize what I do and trust me to do my job to the best of my ability.

A while ago I read something like 60% (I’m making that up) of people use their cell phones as a flashlight. Of course now I can’t find the article that I read that in but I would bet that I’m not far off. I use my iPhone almost everyday as a flashlight when I’m going to bed because the way the light switches are set up in my apartment.

So having an app on my iPhone that turned it into a flashlight is very handy. You have a few choices to pick form: Flashlight, Torch and myLite. Of course the one I use is no longer avaiable: Light by Erica Sadun.

One common feature and the one I’ll be focusing on is all of them can turn your screen white. It sort of reminds me of the old Palm apps that turned your screen into a mirror by turning all the pixels black. The white screen for all the apps, except for for Light, can only be as bright as your current brightness setting. So if you need more light you have to open up your settings and change it then re-open the app. Light automatically turns up the brightness to the highest setting. This sometimes is annoying because it doesn’t set it back to the setting you had it on.

Flashlight doesn’t do anything other then turn your screen white. Not much to say there other then it’s free.

Torch on the other hand shows a splash screen and requires you to tap the screen to turn on or off the light.

myLite, last but the most feature rich. Features on an app that turns you iPhone into a flashlight? What? That doesn’t make sense. myLite allows you to change the color and make it darker from your current brightness setting.

Well it’s that time again, Thanksgiving and Thursday. Time for FOOD! Yay. With it being Thanksgiving I figured that it would only be fitting to review a food related app. So I give you Urbanspoon.

Urbanspoon is a fancy little app that allows you to find new restaurants near you or even find ones you already know. Urbanspoon makes use of the accelerometer; when you shake the phone it will preform a random search based on your preferences. It uses a slot machine style interface where you can lock in your preference of neighborhood, type of cuisine and price (or how expensive the place is).

Urbanspoon also allows you to register, find your friends and write reviews of places you’ve been. I haven’t used this feature yet but it does look promising.

If you are looking for a particular restaurant you can use the search or browse features:

Also if you want to just see what is around you, use the Near me functon. I’ll use the built in aGPS to figure out your location and give you a list of the closest restaurants.

Over all Urbanspoon is really easy to use. It has a straight forward interface and gives you pretty good results. I have found though that sometimes (very infrequently) that some of the information is wrong. Sometimes it’ll bring up a restaurant that has been closed down (for years in one case) or moved. They do provide a way to you to notify them of changes but I haven’t see the changes take yet. This could be somewhat troublesome if you are in an unfamiliar place.

Nice little free app that is worth your time if you like to eat (and who doesn’t like food?)