Recently I discovered the online woodworking community… something which I never even thought of looking for online.
Through the searches and feeds I’ve amassed – I’m finding a lot of inspiration and a ton of projects I’d like to build. The first of which is a reproduction Stickley tabouret.
I’m not finished yet – I just finished staining it tonight and I’ll put topcoat on it in the next few days. But, building it was quite a pleasure, as there’s a lot of good construction and joinery techniques to practice in it.
It’s an excellent little table/stool, with good proportions and a nice size.
A good friend of mine (and a fantastic UI designer) ran away to seek fortune and fame with a vc firm in Canada. After I started pouting, he sent me an invite to their latest creation, and I’ve been using it for the last month or so.
The site is pretty nifty… and, as they say, targeted towards HSTG (high-school teenage girls)… but it has some interesting social networking aspects to it.
I would classify it as IM on steroids, or Twitter with threaded responses.. and I can see this being a new gossip channel for those that do that sort of thing.
New features are rolling out quickly, but it really is a nifty little talk channel – and with integration with a Jabber client you can easily keep in touch with what your friends are doing.
I’ve posted my invite link in case anyone wants to try it out… if anything it could be useful to get an idea of what young kids are doing. http://plurk.com/redeemByURL?from_uid=229&check=-2142784318
And finally, way to go Alvin! The site looks really fantastic and we miss you.
The new webclips allow users to add ‘one-click’ access to web based applications on their iPhone and iPod Touch.
Web developers can provide an icon specifically for the main screen of the iphone, by adding a file to their server or a link within the head of their document.
The icon sizing is a little tricky to get the hang of. While the Apple website recommends 57×57 for an icon size, I’ve found that a larger image will create a sharper icon.
There is also areas of the image which will get trimmed to make the webclip icon, so add some padding.
Place apple-touch-icon.png in the root of your web server, or add <link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/path/to/myicon.jpg" /> to the head of your document.
If your PEAR installer is acting funky, returning 404’s, remote packages not found etc you may have an ancient version in need of upgrading. As announced almost a year ago, XML RPC would be disabled on Jan 1st, 2008.
Here’s a typical error:
# pear list-upgrades
HTTP error, got response: HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Didn't receive 200 OK from remote server. (HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found)
Yesterday I gave a presentation to a group of campus web developers on Test Driven Development, and how it relates to web applications.
The topics I covered included:
* Test Driven Development
* Unit Testing
* Selenium & integration with unit testing frameworks
* Continuous Integration & Cruise Control
Overall I think everyone was able to grasp all the topics covered, and leave with a basic understanding of TDD philosophy, the benefits of it, and how to get started.
When you proudly proclaim that your application works in mobile browsers, and you’ve dedicated resources to creating a mobile edition of your web application – you might want to make sure it actually works.
This page contains the following errors:
error on line 2 at column 848: EntityRef: expecting ‘;’
Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.
As my wife can attest to, when I opened our electric bill this month it was as if I had won the lottery.
$50.13
Now that might not seem like a big deal to some, but, considering that we have no natural gas bill – I think that’s quite a number.
I’ve already blogged about our Energy Star home, heat pump and electric water heater, and my use of compact florescent light bulbs – but I’ve also tracked our electric bill since we moved in.
We’re now over 1 year in the house, and to celebrate, I’ve published our electric bill as a Google document.
An interesting tidbit of information is the fluctuation of the price per kilowatt hour. In the winter months, the price drops quite a bit as electricity becomes more abundant due to the majority of homes using natural gas for heat. By looking at the numbers you can see that our usage goes up quite a bit in the winter, but the cost stays relatively low.
Our house is probably an average sized starter home, 1246 sq feet with a 560 sq ft basement… so about 1800 altogether and while pretty efficient – I’m sure there is room for improvement. A step would be enabling the power saving features on my computers, which I’ve refrained from doing. Next to that, tweaking our thermostat settings may allow me to kill-a-watt. (wishlist item)
I’ll continue to track this and see comparably how we’re doing over the next year – with the goal of reducing the average kw/h usage. Overall it’s an exciting time to be excited about energy efficiency and conservation.
I’ve waited quite a while before I could fully endorse the iPhone as a complete mobile platform, but the latest ‘improvements’ have pushed me over the fence in favor.
When others had asked me how I liked it, I usually would state that Apple warps people into believing products are great – and their users tend to overlook any problems.
Here’s some problems I’ve run into:
* Safari crashed quite a bit – with the two updates, it’s better.
* My iPhone crashes/locks up more than my Palm Treo 650 did.
* The 802.11 wireless will cause lockups when connecting to some access points.
* The ATT Edge network is slower than alltel’s.
* Mail app is crap – I can’t manage all the email I follow without threaded conversations (perhaps there’s a setting).
* Price reduction hit me, but I didn’t really care that much.
* Stupid headphone jack size.
* No disk use – come on Apple?
* Notes don’t sync anywhere!
Some benefits:
* My wife has a phone she’s happy with.
* iPod & phone in one!
* Slimmer than my Treo, and any other phone I’ve had.
* Battery life is awesome.
* Camera capability works with Linux.
* http://jailbreakme.com/ and the Installer unlock everything.
** IRC on my phone!
** iFlickr uploads photos to my flickr account.
** Tetris – nuf said.?
** The ultimate geek tools: bsd utils, ssh, and a terminal.
Jailbreakme was the turning point. Custom applications make this mobile phone the best I’ve had yet, and for what I use it for extended the life of my desktop at home for at least another year or two. I use my desktop at home for development, email, and web… and it’s turning 5 years old this Christmas. I would be purchasing a new computer this year, except the utility of my iPhone has given me no reason to buy a new PC – everything I need is now in my pocket.
Steve Souders of Yahoo! gives a talk on the important steps to take for ‘High Performance Websites.’ What I found interesting is that he follows a different perspective than most people when it comes to high performance websites. His research shows that the largest amount of improvement you can make is in the actual frontend loading of the page. Which is to say, what it takes to get your web app displayed in the client’s browser.
He basically outlines the 14 rules used in the YSlow browser extension and why they’re important. An interesting video if you’re interested in making your web applications run faster.
An interesting talk which takes a different line of thinking than backend improvements for high performance & scalability. I’m about halfway through Theo Schlossnagle’s book on Scalable Internet Architectures. If I ever finish that book I’ll try and post a review of the interesting points.
If Google doesn’t have the answer, and it takes you more than 10 minutes to fix – it is your responsibility as a web publisher to document the solution.
Error I ran into today while trying to install some CPAN modules –
ucommbieber:~ bbieber$ sudo cpan install Encode::HanExtra
CPAN: Storable loaded ok
Going to read /Users/bbieber/.cpan/sources/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
Going to read /Users/bbieber/.cpan/sources/modules/02packages.details.txt.gz
CPAN: Compress::Zlib loaded ok
Deep recursion on subroutine "Compress::Raw::Zlib::AUTOLOAD" at /Library/Perl/5.8.6/darwin-thread-multi-2level/Compress/Raw/Zlib.pm line 71.
perl(23237) malloc: *** vm_allocate(size=234504192) failed (error code=3)
perl(23237) malloc: *** error: can't allocate region
perl(23237) malloc: *** set a breakpoint in szone_error to debug
Out of memory!
Segmentation fault
Brett Bieber works for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln as a lead programmer within the Communications department, is a PEAR Group member, open source advocate, and general PEAR nut. He also enjoys woodworking, guitars, homebrewing and spending time with his wife, Katie, in Lincoln, NE.
Next to that, tweaking our thermostat settings may allow me to kill-a-watt. (wishlist item)
