(via Olly Moss)

Pentagon blasts WikiLeaks founder

T-Mobile's apparent myTouch 3G HD gets spied from the rear

myTouch 3G HD?! I thought the iPhone 3GS was a bad name. Leave it to T-Mo to one up it's already poorly named myTouch 3G.

From the article:

So, how do you feel about the look of this myTouch 3G HD we've been seeing this week? Haven't formed a complete opinion yet? Well, maybe this new shot -- seemingly of said phone's backside -- will help. As we've seen on past models, the rear features a tastefully-sized myTouch logo, lending a dose of credibility to the picture that seems to have been covertly snapped off a monitor where the render was being shown. In other words, we don't have much reason to doubt this thing -- and considering that the Vibrant isn't a member of the myTouch line, T-Mobile's overdue for a refreshed non-QWERTY Android device in that segment of the market. Should be an interesting few months for these guys, no?

T-Mobile's apparent myTouch 3G HD gets spied from the rear originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Has Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg ditched Apple's iPhone for Google's Android?

I'm officially unsubscribing from 9to5 Mac. If the phone usage of a punk-ass kid that happened to rip off the right idea at the right time (aka Mark Zuckerberg) is important enough or relevant enough to an Apple news/rumors site (nay, to any website on the Internet), there is something very, very wrong.

From the article:

Update!: Not to worry Apple Brethren: Gawker has been tailing Faceberg for the last week and have him using iPhone like it is going out of style.

We're still waiting for Facebook to pull its finger out and deliver a decent version of its app for the iPhone and iPad, now it seems Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, may have ditched his iPhone for an Android thing.

Well, this is based on one piece of Facebook activity on Zuckerberg's blog: "Mark installed the Facebook for Android application to his phone".

Interestingly, Redmond Pie notes that the Facebook app for Android needs improving even to catch up with the crappy iPhone version. Pretty poor, huh, Facebook?

Dan Frakes on the Magic Trackpad

Dan says that the new Apple battery pack setup could power three peripherals at once, when I figured it was set up to power two peripherals with a rotating fully charged battery (staggering the fully charged device).

From the article:

The buttons are in the front feet underneath.

 ★ 

★ An Improved Liberal, Accurate Regex Pattern for Matching URLs

Regular Expressions really is a write only "language".

From the article:

Back in November, I posted a regex pattern for matching URLs. It seems to have proven quite useful for others, and, even better, based on feedback from those who’ve used it, I’ve since improved it in several ways.

The problem the pattern attempts to solve: identify the URLs in an arbitrary string of text, where by “arbitrary” let’s agree we mean something unstructured such as an email message or a tweet.

So, here’s a pattern that attempts to match any sort of URL, using the extended multiline regex format that disregards literal whitespace and allows for comments, which explain a bit about how the pattern works:

(?xi)\b( # Capture 1: entire matched URL (?: [a-z][\w-]+: # URL protocol and colon (?: /{1,3} # 1-3 slashes | # or [a-z0-9%] # Single letter or digit or '%' # (Trying not to match e.g. "URI::Escape") ) | # or www\d{0,3}[.] # "www.", "www1.", "www2." … "www999." | # or [a-z0-9.\-]+[.][a-z]{2,4}/ # looks like domain name followed by a slash ) (?: # One or more: [^\s()<>]+ # Run of non-space, non-()<> | # or \(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\) # balanced parens, up to 2 levels )+ (?: # End with: \(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\) # balanced parens, up to 2 levels | # or [^\s`!()\[\]{};:'".,<>?«»“”‘’] # not a space or one of these punct chars ))

Here’s the same pattern in the terse single-line format:

(?i)\b((?:[a-z][\w-]+:(?:/{1,3}|[a-z0-9%])|www\d{0,3}[.]|[a-z0-9.\-]+[.][a-z]{2,4}/)(?:[^\s()<>]+|\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\))+(?:\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\)|[^\s`!()\[\]{};:'".,<>?«»“”‘’]))

(And you thought the multiline version looked crazy, right?)

Here’s the test data I used while sharpening the pattern. Just like the pattern from November, it attempts to be practical, above all else. It makes no attempt to parse URLs according to any official specification. It isn’t limited to predefined URL protocols. It should be clever about things like parentheses and trailing punctuation.

In addition to being liberal about the URLs it matches, the pattern is also liberal about which regex engines it works with. I’ve tested it with Perl, PCRE (which is used in PHP, BBEdit, and many other places), and Oniguruma (which is used in Ruby, TextMate, and many other places). It should also work in all modern JavaScript interpreters. If you find a modern regex engine where the pattern does work, please let me know.

Some of the advantages of the new pattern, compared to the previous one:

• It no longer uses the [:punct:] named character class. I thought this was universally supported in modern regex engines, but apparently it is not.

• It does a better job with URLs containing literal parentheses, correctly matching the following URLs that the previous pattern did not:

  http://foo.com/more_(than)_one_(parens)http://foo.com/blah_(wikipedia)#cite-1http://foo.com/blah_(wikipedia)_blah#cite-1http://foo.com/unicode_(✪)_in_parenshttp://foo.com/(something)?after=parens

• It now matches mailto: URLs.

• It correctly guesses that things like “bit.ly/foo” and “is.gd/foo/” are URLs. Basically: something-dot-something-slash-something.

Included in the parentheses-matching improvements is the ability to match up to two levels of balanced, nested parentheses — parentheses within parentheses. There are fancy ways of using dynamic or recursive regex patterns to match balanced parentheses of any arbitrary depth, but these dynamic/recursive pattern constructs are all specific to individual regex implementations. I.e., there’s one way to do it for PCRE, a different way for Perl — and in most regex engines, no way to do it at all. Hard-coding the pattern to support two levels of nested parenthesis should work everywhere, and, practically speaking, I only received two reports of actual real-life URLs that had a second level of parentheses, and none with more than two.

Lastly, I received several requests for a version of the pattern that only matches web URLs — http, https, and things like “www.example.com”. Here’s an extended format pattern that does this:

(?xi)\b( # Capture 1: entire matched URL (?: https?:// # http or https protocol | # or www\d{0,3}[.] # "www.", "www1.", "www2." … "www999." | # or [a-z0-9.\-]+[.][a-z]{2,4}/ # looks like domain name followed by a slash ) (?: # One or more: [^\s()<>]+ # Run of non-space, non-()<> | # or \(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\) # balanced parens, up to 2 levels )+ (?: # End with: \(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\) # balanced parens, up to 2 levels | # or [^\s`!()\[\]{};:'".,<>?«»“”‘’] # not a space or one of these punct chars ))

And here’s the same pattern in single-line format:

(?i)\b((?:https?://|www\d{0,3}[.]|[a-z0-9.\-]+[.][a-z]{2,4}/)(?:[^\s()<>]+|\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\))+(?:\(([^\s()<>]+|(\([^\s()<>]+\)))*\)|[^\s`!()\[\]{};:'".,<>?«»“”‘’]))

As before, suggestions and improvements are welcome, including just sending me example input where the current pattern fails.

Justin Bieber attempts daring Segway escape from mob of screaming tweens

Have you ever heard a Justin Bieber song? Erin was listening to a bunch of samples on iTunes the other day while we were watching TV and decided to torture us with a couple of Bieber samples. Basically, take a Miley Cyrus song, change the words so that it is more-or-less about girls instead of guys, then go back in time and get Miley Cyrus to sing the song when she was 8, and you'll have the equivalent to Bieber. In other words, Bieber sounds like a pre-pubescent lesbian pop girl. It's frightening.

From the article:

Yes, you've undoubtedly heard about the YouTube sensation-turned-teen-heartthrob Justin Bieber's ability to attract mobs of screaming teenaged girls wherever he goes, but you've probably never seen a scene quite like this one. In the video, Biebs tries to make his getaway from the mob on a Segway, renowned only for its ability to send women screaming away from you. It's worth a few viewings, we assure you -- the video is below.

Continue reading Justin Bieber attempts daring Segway escape from mob of screaming tweens

Justin Bieber attempts daring Segway escape from mob of screaming tweens originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Jul 2010 14:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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London Times Loses Almost 90 Percent of Online Readership

Now, if we can just explain this to the people who make shopping carts, we'd be making some progress. At least a 90% drop in readership is enough to punch ad revenue right in the kisser. If they don't renege on mandatory registration soon, I'd be surprised (assuming the Guardian's calculations are correct, and the number of paying customers didn't sharply rise as the freeloaders quit reading enough to augment the lack of ad traffic).

From the article:

Josh Halliday, reporting for The Guardian:

The Times has lost almost 90% of its online readership compared to February since making registration mandatory in June, calculations by the Guardian show.

Dumb.

 ★ 

Pour one out: T-Mobile G1 no longer for sale

Apple Magic Trackpad first hands-on

Yay! The HID I always wanted! Seriously, the trackpad is the most functional HID Apple (or maybe anyone) has ever made. Apple has proven time and time again that they suck at designing mice, so it's never really been an option for me to get a mouse that "just works" with my Mac (e.g. checking battery levels from my Bluetooth menu). This thing looks like a win for my workflow.

From the article:

So it's real, and... it's a trackpad. What seemed like pure rumor and some good Photoshopping just a short while ago has magically (ha ha!) transformed into reality. If you're wondering what the Magic Trackpad is like to use -- get ready for a shock. It feels just like using a slightly larger version of a MacBook or MacBook Pro pad. And we mean exactly, right down to the multitouch gestures and whole-pad click. Yes, it clicks. There's also a new gesture, if you're keeping track -- a three-finger move that lets you drag windows around (very helpful), though you give up the functionality of being to navigate stuff like iPhoto galleries with a swipe. Not a huge loss, really. We're going to be doing some serious testing with the new peripheral, but for now, feast your eyes on the pics below.

Gallery: Magic Trackpad first hands-on

Apple Magic Trackpad first hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Jul 2010 09:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mini confirms entry into 2011 World Rally Championship with Countryman

Now this is a Mini I could drive.

From the article:

Filed under: Motorsports, Hatchback, Mini, Racing

2011 Mini Countryman WRC - Click above to enlarge

Were it not for the efforts of John Cooper and drivers like Paddy Hopkirk on the European rally stages of the 1960s, the Mini brand probably wouldn't have the beloved reputation that it does today - in fact, it's possible it would never be around today at all. BMW has confirmed a longstanding rumor with today's announcement that Mini is heading back to international rallying with the Countryman WRC beginning in 2011.

The Countryman WRC is being developed by long-time Subaru partner Prodrive for the new Super2000 regulations and will run in select World Rally Championship rounds in 2011 before taking on the full 2012 season and beyond. The rally special will have a turbocharged 1.6-liter inline-four with all-wheel-drive. Prodrive started work on the project early last year and testing will start this Fall.

[Source: BMW]

Continue reading Mini confirms entry into 2011 World Rally Championship with Countryman

Mini confirms entry into 2011 World Rally Championship with Countryman originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 27 Jul 2010 09:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Carl Howe Sets the Record Straight on That Survey Regarding iPhone and Android Customer Satisfaction

Remember that link Friday about the survey that showed a startling difference in iPhone and Android customer satisfaction? Not so fast. Yes, 77 percent of iPhone owners plan to buy another iPhone. But, as Howe (the analyst who wrote the report) explains, their Android numbers were specific to owners of “Google-branded” phones:

You’ll note in the excerpt above, we were careful to say “Google-branded Android phone owners”. That’s because our data keys on the manufacturer of the phone as the way to determine what type of phone a consumer owns. Because all non-Google Android brands make phones using other operating systems, Google-branded phones are the only ones we can be certain run Android. However, restricting ourselves to that category means that we leave out a big segment of Android owners, specifically those who own Motorola Droids and HTC EVOs among others.

The only Google-branded phones are the Nexus One and the clunky 2008 G1, so the results clearly aren’t representative of Android owners in general.