Who is listening to your iTunes?

By Josh Highland in music, software, tutorials

sharing_itunes.gif

If you use iTunes while your computer is hooked to a network (work, dorms, and coffee shops are good examples), you can share your iTunes with other people. This feature has been around for a long time in iTunes. Something that isn’t included is the ability to see how many, and who is listening to your music.

I did a little bit of searching an found that iTunes uses port 3689 to share music on. Reaching back into my DOS days, I came up with this:

press the windows key + r
enter “cmd” and press enter
at the prompt type:
netstat | find “:3689”

you will get a listing of all the computers connected to your iTunes. A useless but interesting trick.

If you are running a mac, I’m sure you can do the same thing but with grep.

cfdump in php!

By Josh Highland in coldfusion, internet, php, software, tutorials, web 2.0

At work, I write ColdFusion, at home I write PHP. I bounce back and forth between worlds. Jack of all trades, master of none I guess.

One thing that I have always loved about ColdFusion is the cfdump tag. You feed it any variable, and it will spit out whats in it. Struct, String, Array, Query, Object, XML, it doesnt matter, it just works. I would go as far to say that its one of the best native debugging resources I have ever seen in a web development language.

In PHP, you can do a print_r() and look at the source, but that is no where as cool as cfdump. I have longed for a cfdump style resource to be available in PHP. Today I got my wish when I stumbled upon “dBug”. http://dbug.ospinto.com

dBug is a small PHP class that duplicates the cfdump tag from ColdFusion

look how simple it is to use:

include_once("dBug.php");
new dBug($myVariable);

The output looks like this:
phpdump.gif

dBug will handle anything you throw at it, just like cfdump does. This is going to help me so much in the future. If you develop in PHP, I think that this class is a must have in your tool kit.

dBug is free! get it today from http://dbug.ospinto.com

Free notpopular.com blogs

By Josh Highland in web 2.0

I have been really happy with this new blog software. So happy that I want to give you your very own blog account on the notpop network.

If you’re interested, please send me an email to joshhighland {at} gmail {dot} com and we can make it happen for you.

You blog account would be in the form of notpopular.com/blogs/YOUR_NAME_HERE

Its free, what do you have to lose?

“Ooo wee ooo, I look just like Buddy Holly”

By Josh Highland in Josh's Rambling

I’m not one to endorse products. Rarely will you see me wear a brand t-shirt, and if you do its for one of my friends companies.

Yesterday I went to the eye doctor, it was time for a new pair of glasses. I got to pick out new frames… I HATE picking out new frames, they never have what I want. I like heavy thick rimmed black glasses. Think Buddy Holly, or your old skool emo glasses. Ever since I have had to wear glasses, I have like the thick frames the most. Most people don’t like this style, so finding glasses like that is alway a pain… until now.

Paul Frank is a company that makes awesome stuff. I think part of the reason for that is because they employ young people that are into indie rock, punk and hardcore music. They actually sponsor a number of hardcore bands but you wouldn’t know that from their clean and sharp boutique image.

Paul Frank has a line of prescription eyeglass frames that people like me have been looking for. You can find the glasses through http://www.baumvision.com

I personally went with the “Pinkerton” frames.
pinkertonframes.jpg

Pinkerton the name of a Weezer album. The singer, Rivers Cuomo is known for his thick glasses, much like Buddy Holly was.
rivers_cuomo.jpg
I dont like Weezer as a band, and I don’t like Rivers and his drug problems, but I like the style of his glasses!

I ordered the frames today, they should be here tomorrow, then I can get my RX filled. I’m excited to have glasses that I actually want this time.

So here it is, this is me officially endorsing a clothing company, Paul Frank. Paul Frank really is my friend!