Out of all the cool iPhone apps I’ve tried out lately this one is the most useful one that I’ll probably rarely use (yes, confusing) – it’s the WordPress 2 app. If I really wanted to make a post worth reading I would probably wait till I was sitting in front of a full blow computer or laptop/netbook to do so. It is a cool little app though, some minor rough edges in parts but totally useable!

[edit: I just discovered a really fantastic feature of this program after it had a little hicup and crashed while I was editing a post. After relaunching it, a message displayed informing me that the changes I made to the message I was working on had been restored. I was able to resume editing the message right where I left off. I really don't mind apps crashing now and then, let's be honest, even the built in iPhone apps crash from time to time (like SMS) but when a free app like this does then gracefully recovers it's a beautiful thing! ]

After deciding I wanted more abilities and better modularity I retired my nearly 6 week old site and threw on WordPress.  All that work… ohh well.  I’ve moved most everything over except for the code samples, we’ll see how that goes.  I created “pages” for the bio/resume information.  I threw the companies and experience into blog posts under the ‘Experience’ category because the pages list at the top (that I initially removed) was getting cramped.  I have tons of themes and plug-ins to sift through to find the coolest ones so that’ll be super fun . Read more

I appreciate your attempt to verify my server’s security but I don’t use phpMyAdmin or any of that other nonsense you were looking to exploit. It would also be nice to be notified personally that you’re going to be attacking my poor old server for reasons unknown . I don’t even have any porn, what else would be worth trying to break in? Read more

I used to have a much simpler app back in the days of firmware 1.x that used VNC – as a server on the desktop and a viewer on the iPhone. It didn’t show the desktop background on the iPhone but allowed for remote cursor movement and keyboard input. That was free and only available to the brave mass of people who have jailbroken their iPhone at the time. Back then the process was a little more hairy than it is today but I digress.  Before Mobile Air Mouse I really wished they had updated that other app to work on the 3.x firmware but now that I’m done whining I’ll get to the point…
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A good friend of mine sent me this random little video and I have had the tune stuck in my head for a few days now. It’s called “Carl Sagan – ‘A Glorious Dawn’, featuring Stephen Hawking” by The Symphony of Science. The first time watching it I really enjoyed the intro, have a peek below. John Boswell, the artist behind The Symphony of Science, pieces together these clips to “…deliver scientific knowledge and philosophy in musical form.”. I, for one, feel he’s done just that. Currently, the three tracks that are on this website are nothing short of excellent from both a musical and tributary standpoint!

Interestingly enough, googling the first quote “I’m not very good at singing songs, but here’s a try” comes up with a couple of links up top directly related to this video and not specifically to Carl Sagan. I suppose that wasn’t one of his more notable quotes .

Dell Mini 10

Well I’ve had my Dell Mini 10 for about a week now and I’ve enjoyed it so much I thought I would write a bit about it. I’ve had 4 Dell laptops including this one and this one has by far been the most portable and affordable system I’ve ever purchased.

It arrived in about a week and a half after I ordered it. The package was about 6 pounds. The box was about the size of a full sized laptop but about half the weight, everything was inside! Read more

Some good pals of mine are getting into the spirit of giving this holiday season with The Great Kindle Giveaway so I thought I’d help them out a little by posting about it here . The blog has a lot of articles about writing or books, book reviews and plenty of open discussion. Check them out and subscribe for your chance to win a Kindle II!

Well this bit me in the rear for a couple hours today. While doing some maintenance for Westlake Eletronic Supply their webmaster, Chris Bourdon, noticed that on all the HTTPS pages IE8 was giving that wonderfully redesigned (and tricky) security pop-up message informing the user that there are insecure items on the page and asks if you want to view the page without them (yes) or with them (no). We certainly didn’t want that popping up all the time but finding what it was couldn’t have been more difficult. A good addition to the developer tools (F12) would be to point out insecure ‘items’ in pages that should be secure. No no… that would have made things too easy, instead we scoured the HTML and JavaScript source and then pulled out fiddler, as any good webmaster or developer would do, to see if we could track down an actual image or file. No dice.

Needless to say, we’re really expecting to find a “src” attribute who’s value was pointing to a http: location or some javascript/ajax calling an insecure page. Nope and nope, apparently it was all due to one of my favorite scripts, sorttable, adding a javascript:void(0) to a generated script tag to defer script loads (and no, I’m not sure what that means as I’ve never had the need to perform such an insecure thing!). Although this could have been accomplished better in sorttable I have to leave it to IE to pull the “telling me there is a problem but not telling me what that problem is at all or telling me in a way that isn’t as helpful as other browsers that have been around not even half as many years were able to do in very early versions” joke on me. It’s a good one but overplayed almost as much as “I’m on a boat”. You win this time IE *shakes fist*!

Well since I’ve been using YUI for the past couple of years I hadn’t paid much attention to jQuery but so far I’m enjoying what seems to be a more streamlined library in general. Both jQuery and YUI have their place in my opinion though. I added the accordion menu to the right with a custom theme and it even let me set a specific section open depending on the page. I had a problem with the accordion jQuery widget and syntaxhighlighter though. I don’t recall exactly what brought me the solution to use beautyOfCode but plugging that right in and changing the html on my code pages seemed to do the trick quite nicely. beautyOfCode is a jQuery plugin that is essentially a wrapper for syntaxhighlighter.

I also added another quick sample to the code section for an AJAX search suggestion drop down I created a couple years back for Westlake Electronic Supply. I haven’t completed an actual search results page yet but for now you can simply enter in words into the search box under the header image and it’ll give you the post which contain those words.

After more editing and optimizing I’ve managed to combine the news, about and experience pages into one short (61 lines) PHP page, 3 sub templates (4 lines each) and one SQL table. At times, I do need to actually code things out before I can see patterns develop or see where I can tweak something to fall inline with something else I’ve already made. Fortunately that then made creating the contextual menus much less convoluted and a mere 30 lines of PHP at this point, it may be a little longer after I add the archival links for this news section though.

Next I’ll be putting some code up in the Code section which will also use the new general posting page.