This is the first growing season in our new house. We have quite a bit of gardening space, so my wife and I will be attempting to fill that space with beautiful and edible plants.
In an attempt to keep this information handy for my own reference, I have decided to start a journal. I’ve made it public in the hopes that it someone might care to share some advice or learn from my inevitable mistakes.
The blog is called The Nu Leaf.
This morning, I completed the final step to activate my iPhone Developer Program membership. The last news I heard about this program indicated that it was (I assume it continues to be) a fairly exclusive program and they are only allowing small numbers of people to join at this time.
I didn’t apply for it until late last week, and I didn’t download the SDK until late in the day it was released, so I’m not sure how I got in so easily. Perhaps they’ve opened the gates to everyone or maybe I just got lucky. I did write a couple of mac apps in the past: MacSaber and WiiSaber. Perhaps they saw those uploads in the Apple Software site and took an interest.
No matter the reason, it’s a bit of a mixed blessing for me. For one, I’ll have to drop my fantastic T-Mobile cellular plan and go legit with my iPhone to run the dev software. I’m currently paying $45/mo for 1500 minutes, unlimited data, and no contract. I’m looking at $79.99/mo for a comparable AT&T plan.
What’s worse, as much as I’d like to, I just don’t have the time to write iPhone apps right now. Heck, I haven’t been able to find enough time to update this blog in months!
Boo hoo, right?
Well, I’ll just have to make the time to write some apps. I have several promising ideas, and I’ll need to sell at least one of them to help justify the increased monthly cost of the new service.
Over the past several weeks, I have gathered nearly 10,000 hits from iPhone users. After sifting through this data, I have found some interesting results:
Only about 28% of my iPhone traffic is from EDGE. Of the EDGE users, 6.2% of them are using T-Mobile.
Here is the breakdown of the top 10 iPhone hosts, cellular providers in bold:
Check out the Google Code Project.
Available soon: WiiSaber source as well as several of my most popular PHP utilities.
Many websites offer the flexibility to display the same page via both SSL and HTTP. The major problem with offering this is the possibility that embedded content will not be served via the same protocol; many browsers will throw an error if an SSL page embeds HTTP images.
However, there is a simple and W3C valid solution to this problem. Simply omit the protocol and colon from the URL:
<img src="http://isnoop.net/sa/av.jpg">
becomes
<img src="//isnoop.net/sa/av.jpg">
This works with embedding images, links, javascript embeds, and other link types.
The drawback to doing this everywhere is that you must be conscious as to whether the resource you are linking to is available on both SSL and HTTPS. Embedded scripts from services like Google Analytics are well served by this technique. If your enterprise uses a dedicated image hosting server, this is also a highly appropriate solution.
Thanks to everyone who supported the iPhone fund. I picked one up this morning and started pushing my macSaber code into the new form factor. As it turns out, however, I’ve been beaten to the punch by not one but two busy little coding bees. The first released app, iSaber is a good first attempt which has been widely attributed to me. The second is in active development and you should be hearing more about it soon. I have turned my MacSaber sources over to this dev and we should expect to see great things.
Contrary to what several blogs are saying, I cannot take credit for iSaber. Credit should be sent to the developer listed in the about portion of that application.
Good luck to everyone working on this project! I’m going to go back to remodeling my house. I’ll be gifting away this fancy iPhone and refunding the donations sent in. Don’t write me off, though. I’ll resume iPhone development around the time they release a 16-32 GB version. (that may come sooner than you think!)
Due to the popularity of MacSaber and WiiSaber, I have received several requests to write iPhoneSaber. Now that the accelerometer has been unlocked, this has become a distinct possibilty.
There’s just one problem. I don’t have an iPhone.
To be honest, I just bought a house and my finance manager (wife) won’t allow the purchase. Therefore, I turn to you. I’m not one for begging, but I have been convinced this is for the greater good.
If you’re interested in a MacSaber port for the iPhone, please consider sending your spare change my way.
Thank you for your consideration.
Update
Thanks to everyone who helped! See next post for more information.
Below is an email I got through Zend’s certified engineer website. The questions posed by the writer below are not uncommon, so I have posted his letter and my response for general consumption.
Hi,
I am an aspiring PHP programmer. I need some advice from the right people like you before taking a plunge into PHP. I know to know what the future holds for PHP in the web development sector. Why is there more demand for ASP.net or Java than PHP when PHP is the best option available for web development. I have heard that PHP professionals are some of the least paid people in the industry, is this true? why should I not go for ASP.NET or Java as compared to PHP? I know it all comes to one’s interest but knowing a stable path for career is also essential. Please help me and my many other colleagues who want to join the PHP community. Your kind help would be highly a appreciated. Please be frank to give your advice.
–Vibhor S.
Vibhor,
Thanks for your email. From my point of view, I am inclined to
believe that PHP is actually in higher demand than ASP or Java.
However, the latter two are likely to be more common for large
companies. I believe this is mostly the result of corporate decision
making and the antiquated belief that PHP is not enterprise class.
Companies like Facebook, Flickr, and Digg are rapidly dispelling that
myth.
The roots of the enterprise class myth also help to explain the
question of compensation. PHP started off as a hobbyist’s language.
From there, it became the de facto scripting language for low-cost web
hosts. As a result, a lot of personal and small business websites
sprung up with PHP as a back end. Lacking the project and budget size
of medium and large companies, most jobs available to PHP developers
were (and perhaps continue to be) for less pay. This is not to say
that there are not good paying PHP jobs available. I live in Seattle
and am one of a group of 6 PHP developers for a medium sized company.
I believe we are competitively compensated compared to the industry at
large.
The other part of the compensation problem might have to do with the
experience curve of PHP programmers. I have seen many developer
resumes and the large majority of people who claim to be PHP experts
are in fact novices or even beginners. PHP is a very simple language
to learn and become comfortable with, but that comfort is not the same
as knowing (and using) best practices, OOP, or even PHP5. Many PHP
developers haven’t had any experience working in a collaborative
environment and, frankly, may not be suitable for full-time work in a
group of developers.
On the question of why one should choose PHP over ASP.NET or Java, I
cannot answer. I chose PHP as my language of choice for personal and perhaps arbitrary reasons. I like that it is open source, works best on *NIX
systems, is in active development, offers a tool for just about any
job, and has a wide and varied user base. It also helps that the
language happens to have a sustainable number of companies offering
full-time work for PHP developers.
One might just as well choose Java, ASP.NET, Ruby, Python, Perl, C++,
or any other popular web language for their own set of reasons.
You’ll find ample work with any of these under your belt. Some might
have a brighter future than others, but you’ll still find COBOL
programmers out there making pretty good money despite the dwindling
need for their chosen skills.
I hope this helps. Good luck with your programming.
–Ian
I frequently use my wife’s Macbook because it always seems to be handy when my own laptop is in the other room. I gave myself a user account on the machine, but she started complaining that I’d often forget to switch back to her user account when I was done.
Being a lazy git, I sought out for a technical solution for this problem. The solution I came up with will automatically switch the active user to one of your choice each time the laptop is put to sleep (the lid is closed):
SleepWatcher is a very simple daemon that adds new wakeup, sleep, and idle event triggers to your mac. At the time of this writing, SleepWatcher 2.0.4 can be downloaded here.
Open the .DMG file and install “sleepwatcher.pkg” then “SleepWatcher Startupitem.pkg”.
I have crafted a small command line application called SwitchUser to facilitate easily scriptable fast user switching.
Download and install SwitchUser 1.0.
Usage: switchuser
Open terminal and type the following line:
sudo nano /etc/rc.sleep
This will prompt you for your password. Once that is done, enter the following line at the end of the file:
switchuser 'target_user‘
Remember to replace target_user with the short user name of the account you would like to switch to. If you don’t know that name, it can be found in /Users/.
To exit the editor, press CTRL + o then CTRL + x.
At this point, you should be able to close the lid of your laptop and the computer will automatically switch to the specified account.
My wife and I have just sealed the deal on our first house! It’s a very nice little three-bed two-story semi-fixer in northern Seattle. We’ve already generated a two page remodeling project list that we sure hope gets done in a reasonable time frame. Thanks to the magic of Google Sketchup, I have a fantastic CAD layout of the entire place that should greatly help us along the way.
Despite taking nearly 500 pictures of the insides of the house and the back yard, I don’t have a single house front photo to share with you.
However, if you’re interested in more updates, check back to this blog every now and then.
Oh, and we’re getting some chickens. The city limits us to the lesser of 20,000 chickens or one per square foot of property space, but I think we just need two or three. We’ll keep you posted on how that goes after we move in.
If you know the name of any really good and really inexpensive architects, interior designers, or contractors, let us know!