Sam’s random musings

So this past two weeks I stopped using LaunchBar and started using QuickSilver, I had always been intrigued with the feature set of quicksilver, but I love and am addicted to LaunchBar. If you use a mac and don’t know these two apps, get out from under your rock and get addicted to them, they will improve the way you use your machine and you will wonder why you do not use them.

So after a week of using QuickSilver I do like it, I can understand why people like it, the extra stuff is wicked cool, but after two weeks I’m going back to LaunchBar. Probably the main reason is speed and learning. LaunchBar is way faster then QuickSilver. For me it is almost always instant, quicksilver is slowing me down (part of this I know is because I am more used to LaunchBar) it takes a while for it to come to the front, it takes a while to list the choices, and it doesn’t seem to learn that ‘int’ is short for interarchy (I know I should move to transmit, but I’m old and get stuck in my ways) and keeps opening the page for intuit.com no matter how many times I seem to down arrow to the right entry and click it. But there is cool stuff, append to text files rocks, creating an email right there is cool, there is neat stuff, but the app is supposed to make me faster and it doesn’t do that…

So if you use QS and you are addicted to it, I know that there are people out there. Tell me how to make it faster and learn better and I’ll give it another go.

The Show With Ze Frank:

It’s like a three- or four-minute-long concentrated, faster-cut, and more sarcastic version of The Daily Show. Absolutely fantastic. The archives go back about a month; I’m rationing them out at just a few a day. I predict this is going to make Ze Frank famous.

#

So funny!

(Via Daring Fireball Linked List.)

Adium to Be a ‘Google Summer of Code’ Project:

This means Google will pay for students to hack on Adium over the summer. (Via Jesper via email.)

Cool it should rock after this…

(Via Daring Fireball Linked List.)

Chris Pirillo animates United’s flight safety…:

Chris Pirillo animates United’s flight safety instructions.

This is funny! Always feel like doing something like this when they come on… by the way is there anyone who doesn’t know how to put on the friggen seatbelt? what is this some throw back to when seatbelts were new? stupid

(Via Scripting News.)

BLOGZOT 2.0 on MacZOT.com is cutting the rate on SubEthaEdit from CodingMonkeys:

BlogZOT! uses the power of blogs to create value for all Mac users. In today’s example: Each qualified blog entry reduces the price of SubEthaEdit from CodingMonkeys from $30.00 to $0.00 by $0.05 per entry. For each entry, that’s $166+ given back to the Mac community.

So these guys together “MacZOT and TheCodingMonkeys will award $105,000 in Mac software”. That’s crazy talk, this is great software if only for the collaborative editing of code, i use it all the time with friends who are learning to code, they paste a question to a page I leave open and I give hints and guidence on it as they work on a problem. And for taking notes on a conference call it’s the bees knees, it’s practically a reason to buy a mac

(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)

Quick Guide to Prototype:

After our readers pointed out in an previous feature that our frequent use of Prototype syntax was making things a bit confusing, we decided it would be best to create a quick reference page for the library to help ease the learning curve for a lot of developers out there. The following tutorial will explain the most common methods used in Particletree projects with simple examples of how to implement them. This guide is meant to be used hand-in-hand with the more exhaustive unofficial Prototype documentation by Sergio Pereira, and the script.aculo.us documentation wiki, which I highly recommend every serious JavaScript / Prototype developer read.

This is a great guide, and the links in the comments are good too

(Via .)

Image gallery and thumbnail generator for CakePHP:

Viktor Nagy has written a tutorial about creating an image gallery with CakePHP. You can see this image gallery in action on this site: http://www.rajk.uni-corvinus.hu/~nagyv/index.php/fenykepek/index/koltozes.

The most useful part of this tutorial is in my opinion the thumbnail generator component which you can use without the image gallery.

(Via cake baker.)

When Ajax Gets Abused:

The programmer who wrote this code could have written scary code without Ajax, but this takes the cake:

function saveform()
{
  var firstName = escapeSql(mainForm.elements.txtFirstName.value);
  var lastName = escapeSql(mainForm.elements.txtLastName.value);
  /* … */
  var offerCode = escapeSql(mainForm.elements.txtOfferCode.value);

<p>&nbsp; <span style="color: #003366; font-weight: bold;">var</span> code =<br />

  ‘  $cn = mssql_connect($DB_SERVER, $DB_USERNAME, $DB_PASSWORD)           ’ +
  ‘          or die("ERROR: Cannot Connect to $DB_SERVER");                ‘ +
  ‘  $db = mssql_select_db($DB_NAME, $cn);                                 ’ +
  ‘                                                                        ‘ +
  ‘  if (mssql_query("SELECT 1 FROM APPS WHERE SSN=\’‘+ssn+‘\’", $cn)) ‘ +
  ‘  { $ins = false; }                                                     ’ +
  ‘  else                                                                  ‘ +
  ‘  { $ins = true; }                                                      ‘ +
  ‘                                                                        ‘ +
  ‘  if ($ins) {                                                           ’ +
  ‘    $sql = "INSERT INTO APPS (FIRSTNM, LASTNM, …, OFFERCD) VALUES ("; ‘ +
  ‘    $sql+= "\’‘+firstName+‘\’,";                                        ‘ +
  ‘    $sql+= "\’‘+lastName+‘\’,";                                         ’ +
  ‘    $sql+= "\’‘+offerCode+‘\’)";                                        ‘ +
  ‘                                                                        ‘ +
  ‘  /* … */                                                             ’ +
  ‘                                                                        ‘ +
  ‘  mssql_query($sql, $cn);                                               ’ +
  ‘  mssql_close($cn);                                                     ’;

  execPhp(code);
}
 

This reminds us to be very strict with what we take in on the server side. Any old PHP? probably not a good thing

Scary!

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)