Josh Highland + TechZulu.com

By Josh Highland in internet, Josh's Rambling, video, web 2.0

Oh man! I’m really excited about this. Last time I was behind a mic was a long time ago (unless you count my podcast).

My friend James Johnson runs the .NET User Group for the Inland Empire. He was having a special program to showcase some of the most valuable members of the .NET community in the Inland Empire. It was a pretty big deal, where were over $40,000 in prizes being given away to the winners.

TechZulu.com, a great site that covers tech events in Southern California, were going to be at the awards filming interviews with the participants and sponsors. One snag, all of their corespondents for TechZulu were on assignment. James hit me up and asked me if I could fill in and be a guest correspondent for TechZulu. He didn’t have to ask me twice (James blogged about it here).

The people that we interviewed at the event were very cooperative and had a lot of good things to say,  Efren from TechZulu is a great guy, and way fun to hang out with. I’m excited about the type of things he is doing to bring attention to tech in so. cal. Im glad I got to help contribute to their efforts. I’m going to try to make it to some of the event they have on their calendar

I was also very impressed by the .NET user group itself. It was great to see that many developers in the Inland Empire coming together to build a strong community. I was born in the Inland Empire, and have lived here all my life, and worked as a developer here. I think that the IE has a wealth of tech resources, so it makes me happy to see people like James Johnson and Efren of TechZulu taking the time to bring attention to developers in the IE.

Watch the interviews from the Inland Empire MVM Awards on TechZulu.com

Win My iPhone! REALLY!

By Josh Highland in hardware, internet, iPhone, Josh's Rambling

If you know me, you know I love my iPhone. I have had it for a year now, and it’s the best portable device that I have ever owned.

Last week Apple announced that they were going to launch a new iPhone on July 11, 2008. I am going to buy one of these new iPhones. Simple math tell us that if I own an iPhone and buy the iPhone 3G, I will have 2 iPhones, that is why I am giving away my iPhone.

Give away your iPhone? Thats right. my iPhone that I love can become yours. It works great, and has been in a hard protective case since that day I got it. It has served me well.

How to enter of the give away:

  1. Join twitter.com if you don’t already have an account
    (twitter is a free micro-blogging site you can update via txt message. I cant get enough of it!)
  2. Follow me on twitter.com, my profile is at http://twitter.com/JoshHighland

Thats it!

on July 11th, after I receive my iPhone 3G, I will randomly pick one of the people following me on twitter as the winner of the contest.

The only catch is I have to have at least 1500 1000 followers on twitter, so tell your friends to follow me. If I don’t have over 1500 1000 followers on July 15th, I will give away a $50 AMERICAN CASH DOLLARS .

also, let it be known that unlocked iPhones sell for more then $300 on ebay! what are you waiting for, follow me on twitter.com today!

If you have any questions, my email address is:
JoshHighland at gmail dot com

Mac on my PC – LEO4ALL

By Josh Highland in hacks, hardware, internet, iPhone, iPod, Josh's Rambling, mac, semi-legal, software, tutorials

In my last blog post I talked about how my computer had a system drive failure. I am waiting for Western Digital to send me a new 10,000 rpm drive to replace the broken one, so in the meantime, I thought I would screw around with trying to put Mac OS X on my desktop.

My friend Luis Majano is a great software developer and swears by his Mac Book Pro. At work I run Windows XP, at home it Windows Vista. I have Ubuntu on my laptop and run CentOS on my web servers, so I’m not a die hard about one OS or another, they all have their place.

I love Linux operating systems, so learning from Luis that Mac OS X sits on top of BSD made me more interested in switching (Apple don’t tell you that in their cute commercials). The price of Mac computers is insane though, and not something I’m blindly going to jump into.

So to the point… a broken PC a spare harddrive, and the want to try Mac OS X, whats a geek to do? A few google searches, and a torrent download later, I had in hand, Leo4All.

Leo4All is an awesome distribution of the hacked apple OS to run on none genuine apple hardware. They even have a great wiki (http://osx86leo4all.wikidot.com)

I dropped the DVD into my drive, booted up and a few minutes later I was in the OS X installer. Formatted the drive into an apple format, clicked install and 10 minutes later I was working inside of OS X! everything was there, even time machine! check out the screen shot below…

I had trouble with my network card, as OS X doesnt seem to like a lot of on-mother-board devices. I fixed that by powering down, and installing an old pci NIC. Booted back up and it was there!

I had no audio, but after a few minutes of googeling around, and following likes from the Leo4All wiki, I had it going.

I still havent had any luck getting my dual monitors to work. OS X doesnt seem to like nVidia cards with 512 megs of ram. Oh well, one monitor is fine with me for now.

The USB ports work, and recognize my iPod and iPhone just fine.

So it looks like I’m set. If the experience goes well, who knows, I just might become a switcher! If you know of some sweet mac software I need to try out, let me know.

LifeStreaming Is Simple As Pie

By Josh Highland in internet, Josh's Rambling, php, software, tutorials, web 2.0

Its not secret, I love social networking, I cant get enough of it. I also love programming and anything internet related.

I’m not sure how I came across it, but a PHP based, Object Oriented RSS caching tool named SimplePie caught my attention.

Previously I had been using a tool called Last RSS, but I found that Last RSS could not handle ATOM feeds.

Digging into how SimplePie works, I found that I could merge several feeds together, sorted by post time, my first thought was to use this to aggregate and cache all the different music related news feeds that and going to add content to notpopular.com v2.5 (when ever I finish it). I started thinking about it a bit more and thought it would be cool to use SimplePie to mash together all of the different RSS feeds from the different social networks I am on.

It wasn’t that hard to use SimplePie and the various social networks to make something really cool.


//establish the feeds
$pownce = new SimplePie("$pownceRSS_url");
$flickr = new SimplePie("$flickrRSS_url");
$twitter = new SimplePie("$twitterRSS_url");
$digg = new SimplePie("$diggRSS_url");
$youtube = new SimplePie("$youtubeRSS_url");


//merge them all together!
$merged = SimplePie::merge_items(array($pownce, $flickr, $twitter, $digg, $youtube));

Then all you have to do is look over each item in $merged, and output the appropriate info you want.

You can see what I built over at www.JoshHighland.com

One thing I really found great was the API that was on the SimplePie site.

After I put this all together, I found out that there is a term for what I had just built. People are calling them “LifeStreams“, which is a very appropriate term. I thought I had invented something, but guess LifeStreaming is like fire or a spear, given enough time people all over the place will discover it on their own.

I encourage you do set up a LifeStream for yourself and post the URL in the comments below. It’s fun!

My LifeStream: www.JoshHighland.com

UPDATE (10/29/08) :
I was having trouble with my feed from twitter dying after a while. It would only fetch it once, then nothing.I found the answer to my problem on the simplePie blog, http://simplepie.org/blog/2008/08/16/twitter-bug/. I followed the instructions and commented out the If statement on lines 1583-1586, and the twitter feed started to work again. I hope that twitter updates their RSS service so hacks like this aren’t needed.

WordPress 2.5 image upload problem : SOLVED

By Josh Highland in hacks, internet, php, software, tutorials, wordpress

This afternoon I upgraded my blog to the latest version of wordpress, 2.5. The install went great and it was simple to do. I didn’t realize that I had any problems until I went to make a blog post and upload an image. When I tried to upload, I was greeted with the following:

Something was for sure messed it. I tried it in several browsers, but had the same results. no luck. I started to go some searching online but since wordpress 2.5 is so new, there was little info to be found. After about an hour of stumbeling around I came across a post on a forum where someone said they got the image upload to work by adjusting their .htaccess file on thier site with the following code.

<IfModule mod_security.c>
<Files async-upload.php>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</Files>
</IfModule>

I made the change to my .htaccess file, and like magic the image upload feature started to work again!

I am making this post in the hopes that other people with similar problems will stumble across this post and be able to fix their problem with out having to wade through all the pages of people trying to diagnose what the problem is when the solution is super easy.