Earlier this morning, I upgraded both my iPod Touch and iPhone to OS 3.

I then had a panic, when I discovered that my purchased applications had all disappeared. I re-synced, a few times, but no joy, so I went off for lunch to drown my sorrows, with Thai Chicken Curry.

When I got back, I discovered all my apps were indeed back on my phone, the issue seems to be that now there are more built in apps, my other apps get bumped off onto other pages, so they were there all the time, but I was not paying attention to the little dot indicators at the bottom of the user interface telling me that I had more pages to scroll to.

You will see by the attached collection of screen grabs from my iPhone, what I mean.

So if you think you have lost all your apps, like silly old me, take a second glance, then start to rearrange them as you like. To move an app, you press and hold them then drag, or use the little x to delete them.

My son says that when you press and hold, the apps shake with fear because they may be deleted.

Well hope this helps some other suckers.

Yesterday, I attended the London Ruby Users Group evening meeting at The Old Session House in Clerkenwell Green. A talk by Patric Sinclair got my attention. The talk was about the concept of Linked Data. I remembered watching a TED Talk by Tim Berners-Lee on the subject some time ago.

I find the whole concept about linked data fascinating. The ability to present data in a more “Machine Readable” form in the format of RDF is truly powerful.

There is a saying that says “knowledge is power”, linked data give more power to the knowledge, allowing analysis of data across diverse data sources.

I have always been concerned about just using a username / password combination for access to online resources.

Ok, I use a strong password generator, to create stupidly ugly passwords that I them have to commit to memory. This works well, in most cases, but sometimes I need a little help remembering them, which means my password need to be stored in some kind of key chain, more of less safe. The issue then comes when you want access to a financial side, and want just that extra level of protection.

Well in steps good old “two factor authentication”. This used to mean carrying round a separate “authenticator”. Well it seems VeriSign have come to the rescue and launched some authentication software for mobile phones. I have installed the iPhone version from the Apple App Store, and set it up with both PayPal and eBay. Now every time I send a payment from PayPal, I need to load up the application on my Phone and enter the magic number it gives me, after I enter my usual username and password.

This gives me a feeling of comfort, knowing there is that extra level of protection baked in. One hopes that these devices can be opened up to a larger number of organisations. The current list is somewhat small and includes mainly US based financial institutions.

I have just watched a video presentation about an up coming product from Google, named Google Wave. This looks to be an amazing piece of technology. It is amazing how the way a browser becomes the application environment. As time goes by, we become more and more cloud dwellers as our digital lives leave the confines of our desktop and laptop computers.

For me “cloud computing” as it is called, had revolutionised the way I work. With my servers in scattered data centres, I can pretty much work from any “net-connected” location. Ok some places still have pretty shitty connection speeds, but for the most part this can be dealt with for a short time, so long as the machine up in the cloud is on a decent connection things work fine for the most part.