For the uninitiated, a flashlight app puts up a blank white screen, and if you aim it around a dark room, your iPhone suffices as a really nice flashlight.

This app has a whopping 1 of 5 stars in the reviews section. There are 73 reviews thus far. Some choice quotes from the App Store reviews:

You could just take a picture of a sheet of looseleaf and bring it up in the dark for cheaper. That’s a pro tip.

0 MEGS!!!

A blank screen for $1?

You could open up Safari…and go to a blank web page and you got a free flashlight to use with less than 3 taps!

This app managed to crack the top 25 paid apps, so either 1. people need flashlights and found this one first or 2. longshot, but the app gamed its way onto the list (which would suck).

Sometimes though, you have to sit back and admire “Pet Rock” phenomena.

Imagine that a driver dies in a car accident, and the driver’s seat has a seatbelt.

• The person dying, despite the availability of a seatbelt which was not worn, is not irony.
• The person dying, despite wearing the seatbelt, is not irony.
• If the seatbelt turns out to be the cause of death, that’s irony.

I quickly found the Mycroft Project at Mozdev lists a bunch of custom search engines you can add to Firefox (including Firefox 3) to fill your needs, with one click.

I’m assuming people are hunting these down historically as they’re missing from the defaults. The latest Mycroft stats page from the end of March shows the popularity of Search Engine plugins as thus:

• YouTube
• Dictionary.com
• isoHunt
• The Pirate Bay
• Mininova
• Thesaurus.com
• IMDb
• Google Images
• Youtube + Google Video

Lo and behold, my friend’s need for YouTube search happens to match the top downloaded Search plugin. One click and he was happily searching YouTube from Firefox.

Didn’t find what you were looking for in the top 25? There’s a search interface to find a huge selection of search engine plugins.

It’s also interesting that those I listed conform to A9′s OpenSearch plugins specification, which is purported to work in both Firefox 2+ and Internet Explorer 7+ (going by the legend at the bottom of the stats page.)

If any particular plugin is missing from the search plugins dropdown in Firefox 3 and is a candidate for inclusion in the default, it’s probably at or near the top of the Mycroft downloads list.

It’s not reflected in this StreetView image, but it’s roughly at the corner:

Update: Since I wrote this post, the lamppost has appeared, but without the signage.

View Larger Map

Two years in, I have 75% of my money back, but half of my loans have defaulted or are in collections. I made a decent amount of interest before a few of these defaulted, as some had APRs of 25%. Judge me as lending at loan shark rates if you wish, but these people were doing things like getting out from under 100% APR “Payday Loans” schemes or trying to establish credit after an ex-spouse trashed their combined credit.

I estimate I’ll reach mid-2009 making about $100, which is better than losing money (which can still happen). But it has been a fun learning experience, and I’m just taking the proceeds out and not re-investing. It’s pretty risky, the lack of repayment makes me angry, and it takes too much time to do research.

I learned something interesting from one of the people at Prosper who I met along the way. Affinity credit cards, like a Stanford or Berkeley credit card (powered by Visa or Mastercard etc) tend to get paid promptly at a much higher percentage of people than a comparable “generic” card. The theory is that people feel like they’re disrespecting their alma mater when they miss a payment.

I found a solution searching for [wordpress feed empty], the result being http://wordpress.org/support/topic/170629. Based on the info there, I added this code to wp-feed.php before do_feed();:

query_posts('showposts=10');

It’s a hack, but for now it works until the next update

This bug tracking page was referenced in the aforementioned support topic, and the ‘milestone’ field says 2.5.2, so I expect that when I use the Subversion method for updating the blog, fixed versions will overwrite my hack.

It also appears that this happens on blogs like mine, where I publish at the root instead of in a /blog/ subdirectory.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1242

It filled in a part of the story which I didn’t understand, which was the pool of money that fed into this machine. Definitely worth a listen.

It’s also got a Ben Mezrich-like chapter, with requisite celebrities, clubs, and bottles of Cristal for some of the key players.

• He has an impeccable work ethic. He applied this to baseball skills, especially in the use of video tape to analyze his stance and swing as a hitter.
• Combined with hard work, he found a niche, and worked that niche his whole career. His niche was hitting singles as opposed to home runs. In this era of Moneyball and Sabermetrics, he might have been more appreciated, nonetheless he hit .394 in 1994. This is a feat that might never be replicated.
• He is a genuinely nice guy.
• He has an unabashed love of fast food. He may have to pay for that in old age, but he loved it anyway. Despite being overweight, he generally avoided injury.
• He never had to cheat to excel. While it’s becoming well-known that his peers were looking for shortcuts in the 80s and 90s, Gwynn has never been implicated in any steroid scandals. His lack of power numbers supports that. “But everyone else is doing it” probably didn’t even register.
• He was loyal to the team and the city: He took less money to be happier playing for his hometown.
• He didn’t get a lot of glory as he spent his whole career in a small market (Mexico to the south, water to the west, desert to the east, Dodger Blue to the north).

Adding it all up: This small-market player, who “just” hit singles and doubles, with a taste for Taco Bell, was elected to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot, my an overwhelming margin, with a vote total on par with Cal Ripken (another hard worker). Best of luck to Mark McGwire or Barry Bonds in even making it to the Hall of Fame.

I have my Tony Gwynn bobblehead proudly displayed in my cube.

(image credit)

If you agree with Dave, and you’re new to Python, I recommend focusing on the first chapter of Python Essential Reference. It’s the best 10-page overview of a programming language I’ve ever come across, and refer back to those pages often. I’ve written numerous scripts and have grown to really like Python over the years (it’s big inside Google), and this book has been indispensable.

My Followers total has surged since I posted this update:

I dare not resume Twittering for fear of turning off potential new Followers…