You can file this one as “well, duh,” but Bloomberg is reporting that AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said that Apple will release a 3G version of its uber-popular iPhone mobile device in 2008. There was no additional information given as far as a release date, price or any new features, so it looks as though the first shot we have at getting any real details about this won’t be until MacWorld in January of next year.

Having a 3G (third generation) network to support the iPhone will be truly wonderful and MUCH needed. To describe it without using any tech jargon, think of it as several times faster than your current EDGE experience and closer to that of what you experience when connected to a Wi-Fi hotspot. Verizon and Sprint customers (and some AT&T) know full well the joys of wireless communications with 3G.

However, only adding a 3G radio to the iPhone won’t be enough to satisfy the fanboys like myself, and if Steve Jobs wants to knock everyone’s socks off again he’s going to have to build some new capabilities into an ‘08 iPhone model. Notably, MMS, GPS, an IM application (iChat would do just fine please), true bluetooth support, a file system browser, the ability to cut and paste (still not sure how they’re gonna accomplish that one though) and most importantly, corporate email support with Microsoft Exchange!

Internet mammoth Google, perhaps one of the Web’s most trusted companies, has voluntarily given an Israeli court the IP address of an anonymous blogger. The prosecutor of the case, which centers on allegations that were posted on Blogger about three members of the Shaarei Tikva council, asked the court to demand that Google hand over the IP address of the anonymous blogger, but the court did not order Google to do so. Rather, Google handed over the anonymous blogger’s IP address to the court and plaintiffs without any legal requirement!

If this were just another shady Internet company then fine, what else is to be expected, but this is Google! The Google! The same Google who at the onset of this case said that “disclosing the blogger’s identity violated rulings on the balance between freedom of expression and a person’s right to his reputation.” Hypocrites!

The reason this upsets me so much, and why you as well should be outraged, is consider how much private information Google has collected about you. Do you use Google Adsense, Analytics, Calendar, Docs, Gmail, Groups, iGoogle, Maps, Picasa, Reader, Talk, Web History, or Webmaster Tools like I do? Or perhaps, Google Desktop, Earth, Finance, Notebook, Orkut, Toolbar or Blogger? If you can answer yes to using any of those then sorry to be the bearer of bad news folks but Google has private information about you on file.

I’m extremely disappointed in Google’s behavior on this one. They are one of the few Internet behemoths able to (I think) live up to the high standards placed upon it by the Internet populace. Let’s hope this isn’t a sign of things to come for everyone’s favorite search engine.

Placely, a social networking Web site tailored toward frequent travelers, launched into public beta two weeks ago. The social travel space, to my knowledge, is one that has yet to become overly saturated, and Placely looks geared up to snag a chunk of the market share.

When you first log in you are taken to a dashboard page, where you can see who is traveling today, who you can meet today (i.e. who is in your area today), and who is traveling soon; all within your own network. At the time of this writing all members are inserted into a Placely Beta network in order to facilitate user interaction and assist users in discovering the features of the site.

The user profiles found on Placely are pretty standard in terms of social networking, although the Ajax functionality on many of the features certainly makes usability a pleasure. Of particular interest, however, is the ability to set privacy levels on different features such as your travel schedule, home location, network, career profile, personal profile, photos and age.

The MyNetwork section shows all of your Placely friends, and can be filtered by various categories. Additionally, you can monitor friend requests and search for/invite other friends. My favorite thing in this section, however, is the “Where Are They Today?” Google Map, where your friends appear as pegs and you can click them to see where they are currently.

The groups section is similar to something you would find on other social networking sites, however Placely throws in the same Google Map feature from the MyNetwork section to allow you to see where the members of the group are today.

Placely’s TravelCal is really the lifeblood of the site. It’s where you go to add trips — single or multiple destination — manage your entire travel schedule, and arrange meetups with friends based upon where you’re traveling on a given day. When you click on one of your trips a search is pre-populated with your location and dates, and Placely will tell you if anyone in your network will be at that location on that date. The search also features a distance drop down, so you can expand your query as desired.

The MeetUp section is basically the search from the TravelCal, but expanded to allow you to enter whatever you like for query criteria. It also adds a Category option so you can search for a particular group of friends.

I am pretty impressed with how easy Placely has made it to manage your friends with your travel calendar. It’s certainly a useful tool for the frequent traveler who spends a lot of time in different places and wants to visit friends. The site states that it is in constant development and improving daily, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see enhancements to the current feature set or even deployment of additional capabilities.

My only concern with Placely is the user base. It’s a great tool targeted at a great niche, but can it get a large enough user base to be successful? The majority of Internet users already belong to a social network and aren’t looking to try something new, especially if their friends aren’t on it. This will be the major challenge for Placely. If it can overcome this obstacle, then I believe that with the features available it can be successful.

Alternatively, as some final food for thought, perhaps they could develop a Placely Facebook App or some sort of Open Social integration, as this would indirectly allow millions of users on other social networking sites to interact with and use the site. Maybe even some sort of widget that bloggers like myself can embed into their sidebars; or, and this is a real stretch, packaging their software for resale to large corporations with thousands of weekly travelers.

If you’re a frequent traveler with friends who travel frequently as well, I would definitely encourage you to check out Placely. Here are some screen shots I captured while using the site:

1) Home Page

2) Dashboard

3) Profile (owner)

4) Profile (visitor)

5) MyNetwork

6) Groups

7) TravelCal

8 ) MeetUp

9) Upload Photo (cool Ajax functionality)

We are painfully reminded every day when we venture out of our homes that the iPhone does not have 3G technology. The EDGE network is brutally slow and painful and there simply is no way to sugarcoat that harsh reality. But wait! All hope is not lost my fellow iPhoners, as we do have a little feature called Wireless Fidelity, better known as WiFi (and no, I didn’t need to Wikipedia that ).

Many features on the iPhone, most notably Safari and Mail, operate such that the greater the available bandwidth the greater the experience of using the application. So it becomes important to know how much you got coming down the pipe back and forth between your iPhone and wireless router. Enter iNetwork Test.

The Web site iNetwork Test exists to perform exactly this function, to tell you how fast your WiFi network speed is currently operating. The site is a piece of cake to use, simply navigate to inetworktest.com and click the “Start Test” button. Then just wait. The quicker your connection the quicker the test will complete. Once the test completes, you select whether you’re operating via WiFi or EDGE, and the Web site records your score.

My WiFi network speeds were as follows:

1st attempt - 925 kbps
2nd attempt - 940 kbps
3rd attempt - 841 kbps
4th attempt - 894 kbps
5th attempt - 910 kbps

Once your score has been recorded you can click on the “Results” button to see how your score relates to the average EDGE and/or WiFi speeds. At the time of this writing, the average EDGE speed is 208 kbps, and the average WiFi speed is 798 kbps, putting me a bit above the average — gotta love that fiber optic pipe.

And to the wise guys out there, yes, it can detect if you’re not using an iPhone:

iNetwork Test for iPhone

2659.3 kbps
Not an iPhone

In conjunction with its release of an Android SDK to any and all developers, Google has released a video touting some of the already developed features of its new Android mobile platform. A lot of the current “look-and-feel” resembles that of the iPhone, but it seems like Google is off to a great start and we consumers will have a pretty slick product come mid-to-end of next year.

Check out the preview video below. Also, to any developers, Google is splitting up $10 million between developers who create the best applications for Android.

Last week I wrote about my Ubuntu installation. At the end of that post I promised some Linux-related posts in the future, and here is my first one.

In my opinion one of the things about Linux that makes it so powerful is the shell. And as powerful as the shell can be, it becomes even more powerful when you create a shell script to execute a multitude of commands. Nobody wants to type ten commands in a row in order to achieve a desired result. Further, nobody wants to type the same ten commands in a row every single day. Enter the shell script.

My first shell script started out as a bit of experimenting but has evolved into quite a useful utility. The end result is a script that automatically backs up the development area of partybody.com at a specified time each night, stores a copy locally on the server, and emails a copy to the relevant administrators.

Let’s take a look at the code (some values have been changed for security reasons):

1 #!/bin/bash
2
3 # “scriptname” - copies all contents of a directory into time stamped tar.gz file in /path/to/backup/file
4
5 TD=$(date +%T-%d_%m_%Y)
6 FILE=”/home/user/web/cms/backup-$TD.tar.gz”
7 DIR=”/home/user/web/dev/”
8
9 # Create the gzipped archive file
10 tar -zcvf $FILE $DIR
11
12 # Send successful backup notification email
13 DEST=”/web/cms”
14 FILENAME=”backup-$TD.tar.gz”
15
16 echo “Automated backup ran successfully at $TD and created file: $FILENAME in FTP location: $DEST.” | mutt -s “Daily Automated Backup Complete” -a $FILE -c cc_email@yoursite.com to_email@yoursite.com
17

To get an idea of what’s going on here let’s examine this code line-by-line.

Line 1 is simply telling the script to use the BASH shell environment. Certain shell environments allow for different scripting capabilities than other shell environments, so it’s necessary to declare which one you’re using on the first line of your script. Note: BASH is the default for most Linux distributions.

Line 3 is a comment. The # character at the beginning of the line tells the shell to ignore all content on that particular line. In this case we’re just using the comment to identify the name of the script and a description of what it is intending to perform.

Line 5 creates our first variable, TD, and gives it the value of $(date +%T-%d_%m_%Y). In this instance we are accessing the built-in date function of the BASH shell and pulling out some values like time, day, month and year in order to create a time stamp.

Line 6 creates a variable called FILE and gives is the value of the backup file to be created. In other words, we’re specifying the filename we want to create and the location where we want to put it.

Line 7 creates a variable called DIR and gives it the value of the directory that we want to backup.

Line 9 is a comment declaring the action that we want to take next, in this case, creating the actual gzipped file.

Line 10 creates the archive file and gzips it taking the $DIR variable as input and the creating the $FILE variable as output.

Line 12 is another comment declaring the final action the script will take, sending the email to relevant administrators.

Lines 13 and 14 are variables that contain values to include as descriptors in the notification email, and have no effect on the execution of the script.

Line 16 echo’s the notification message into the email as the body content. The program Mutt is used to send the email. It accepts the piped input from echo and we specify a subject using the -s flag, an attachment using the -a flag, and a cc address using the -c flag. All that together sends an email to the “to” and “cc” email addresses with the subject of “Daily Automated Backup Complete” and attachment of the $FILE (”/home/user/web/cms/backup-$TD.tar.gz”) the script created.

And that’s it. Only 16 lines to backup any directory (including sub-directories), store a copy on your server, and email to whomever you wish.

There is still one problem with this script, though. As it stands it must be manually executed in order to run, and who wants to have to ssh into their server every time they want to run a backup. Therefore, we must auto-schedule the script using cron.

Cron is a time-based scheduling service driven by a crontab, a configuration file that specifies shell commands to run periodically on a schedule. Basically, we just need to add a line to this crontab file telling the shell to execute our backup script at a time of our choosing.

In this case, I added the following line to my crontab file to execute the script every day at 3 a.m.:

0 3 * * * /path/to/script/scriptname

Also, one final note, be sure to make your script executable or else it will not run. We can do this by using chmod +x as follows:

chmod +x /path/to/script/scriptname

That’s all for now. You should be able to adapt this code into a backup script of your own. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments section below.

Apple Insider is reporting (via Piper Jaffray) that the next major iPhone firmware update won’t be coming out until early next year (it’s likely to see minor feature additions and bug fix updates like the one we saw last week). However, the good news is that when the update finally makes its way onto our iPhones it will come with Spotlight, the system-wide search feature found in Apple computers like the Macbook, Macbook Pro, iMac and Mac Pro.

It should come as no surprise, really, as the iPhone runs — albeit stripped down — Mac OS X just like the aforementioned computers. Also, technically speaking, the iPhone itself is quite a powerful little computer.

Once embedded onto our iPhones, Spotlight will allow users to search through contacts, emails, phone numbers, and calendar events via a single interface.

The update is currently rumored to drop around February, when the iPhone SDK is to be released and the platform will finally be open to third-party applications.

I think this will be a great addition to the iPhone IF a feature that allows you to use the iPhone as a filesystem is released in parallel. As it stands presently, I know the contents of my contacts, phone numbers and calendar events as I am 100% responsible for creating them. Thus, there’s really no point in allowing me to search through them for keywords, it would actually take longer than browsing directly. Email being the only current exception, as some search functionality would be nice. However the true power of Spotlight on the Mac comes from its ability to search through all types of files, not just a finite set of pre-defined types currently available on the iPhone. If users were allowed to use the iPhone as a storage disk, and put whatever we wanted on it, then Spotlight would truly prove an invaluable resource.

A recent study published in the U.S. journal Sexuality Research and Social Policy found that one-third of women who meet someone online have sex on the first date, and that 75% of the time a condom is not used. But that’s not all, 27% of the 584 women surveyed admitted to performing oral sex on the first date!

To be fair, although the study makes no mention of male habits in this capacity, I’m sure the numbers are likely to be very similar or even worse.

I must say that after a little pondering I’m not all that surprised. Typically the ones who are active online daters (both men and women) either have trouble meeting people face-to-face or haven’t had any luck using conventional methods and want to try something new and different. In either circumstance, a lot of sexual frustration is acquired over time so when the moment comes that he or she actually meets a prospective mate, the potential for intercourse is monumental.

That being said, people — women especially — need to have greater self-respect and make their partner earn their respect, affection, and ultimately, body.

Today I stumbled across a wonderful Web site which I think everyone should visit and donate at least 5 to 10 minutes of their time. The site is called FreeRice, and in a nutshell it donates grains of rice for every vocabulary word you get right.

Rice is earned 10 grains at a time, for each word that you guess right. The rice is then given to the United Nations World Food Program (WFP), who in turn distributes it to over 1,000 organizations in 75 countries. Rice is paid for by various site advertisers, such as American Express, Office Depot, Liz Claiborne and many more.

The site launched a little over a month ago on October 7th (best day of the year ) and has at the time of this writing raised 1,072,025,720 grains of rice for the hungry.

I strongly encourage everyone to head over to freerice.com and play for a few minutes. In addition to allowing some people to fill their stomachs, you might just learn something.

Democrats have their reasons for wanting to bring the troops home. Republicans have their own reasons for wanting to keep the troops there. You may have your own reasons for why you want the troops to come home or stay put. The bottom line: nobody’s opinion matters. Democrats, Republicans, you, me, everyone else, all of our opinions mean absolutely nothing. There is one single reason to bring the troops home that supersedes all other arguments: simple human morals and decency.

Yesterday President Bush visited the Center for the Intrepid at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, which yielded a number of photo ops with the president for injured Army soldiers. The photos are incredibly gut-wrenching and make you want to burst into tears.

It’s very easy to lose track of what is happening on the other side of the globe during the hustle and bustle of everyday life here in America, and I think every American needs to see these photos and be reminded of just what is happening over there.

To let me further drill home the point, these photos are just of American soldiers. Let us not forget the hundreds of thousands of civilians that have died and millions injured just like in these photographs. Every human life shares an equal value. American, Iraqi, Afghani, we are all equal.

I cannot comprehend how a president can continue to subject human beings to such brutal conditions, let alone go and visit some of the ones he is responsible for maiming. This war needs to end, and it doesn’t matter who stops it or who’s right or wrong we can figure that out later. Just stop the killing and injuring of human beings just like you and me. End the war, now!