Sam’s random musings

Take screenshots with iPhone 2.0 software

Running the new iPhone 2.0 software? Want to grab a screenshot of something? Turns out it’s amazingly easy. Hold the Home button down, then tap the power button on the top of the phone. The screen will flash white, and that’s it — the screenshot has been taken.

Sweet feature

(Via MacOSXHints.com.)

Prototype JavaScript framework: Prototype hosted on Google’s servers

The AJAX Libraries API is a content distribution network and loading architecture for the most popular open source JavaScript libraries. By using the Google AJAX API Loader’s google.load() method, your application has high speed, globaly available access to a growing list of the most popular JavaScript open source libraries including:

• jQuery
• prototype
• script.aculo.us
• MooTools
• dojo

Coding Horror: Is HTML a Humane Markup Language?

One of the things we’re thinking about while building stackoverflow.com is how to let users style the questions and answers they’re entering on the site. Nothing’s decided at this point, but we definitely won’t be giving users one of those friendly-but-irritating HTML GUI browser layout controls.

I am also bothered by the gui widgets that people tend to like in pages, for one I want more control given to my designers over my ‘users’ pages. Generally people really abuse those controls and make the ugliest darn things. The worst looking emails tend to come from yahoo and other web mail products that have those darn things.

I also like the markup that markdown makes, easy to style into something that flows with the rest of the site. Not by me you know, but by my designers…

Displaying errors

<?php
    $isDev  = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] == ‘dev.phpguru.org’;
    $isLive = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] == ‘www.phpguru.org’;

    if ($isDev) {
        error_reporting(E_ALL);
        ini_set(‘display_errors’, 1);

    } elseif ($isLive) {
        error_reporting(0);
        ini_set(‘display_errors’, 0);
    }
?>


sometimes the simple ways are the best ways. I do some very similar things build on this same approach…

(Via phpguru.org - Richard Heyes’ ramblings and code.)

Representative Line: On a Budget: “

‘I was called in by a small company to make some minor changes to their software,’ Baughn wrote, ‘mostly language translations. Apparently, the normal maintainer had just up and quit.’
‘As I entered my temporary office, I got an inkling of why. On the wobbly desk sat a flickering 15′ CRT attached to a grimy, Compaq-branded Pentium II. But what made up my mind, however, was this following line.’

if (exitStatus==(3-3)) // Sorry, some ov my keys are broken

You know you are in trouble if this could happen in your home office, as a remote worker….

(Via The Daily WTF.)

<

p>Bingodisk and Strongspace: What Happened?

The past 10 days have not been the best days at Joyent. Bingodisk and Strongspace went off-line 12 Saturday. Bingodisk service was restored eight days later on 19 January. Strongspace limped back into service late 21 January, nearly ten days after it went off-line. Customers of these services are rightly outraged by the outage. While Strongspace and Bingodisk represent a very small fraction of Joyent’s entire infrastructure, we understand how critical it is to many of you, and have been working and investing many, many hours to bring these services back on-line as expeditiously as possible. I apologize for the outages.

This is an important read on a couple of fronts.

• it really helps one to understand the dangers of putting all your backup plans in a single ‘cool’ technology
• that the really hard part about a problem that requires restoration from a back up is the restoration
• that this kind of transparency about a problem will probably go a long way for Joyeur.

It should be noted that I am the owner of a couple of lifetime plans with Joyeur and really like most of their services.

(Via Joyeur.)

Beanstalk Subversion Hosting

Beanstalk is a hosted Subversion system, offering a simple web-based UI for creating and managing repositories. They also offer smooth integration with systems such as Basecamp, Campfire, FogBugz, Twitter, and Lighthouse. You can get started with a free account — free, I say — in just minutes, and can upgrade to a paid plan at any time. Beanstalk is a perfect example of a ‘do one thing and do it well’ service.

This is a nice looking service, one that I might test out for the next collaborative project that I have for a client. Traditionally I have set up the repos on a machine that I control and then have to figure out how to migrate the service later. It might be nice to take an existing service and just pass it off instead….

(Via Daring Fireball.)

Server Switcher :: Firefox Add-ons

Server Switcher is a navigational help tool for web developers. It allows you to easily switch between sites on your development and live servers, so that you can immediately see the differences…

Great tool for developing sites

(Via Koke.)