I got a mac

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

mac_mini

As part of my 2009 new years resolutions, I’m going to write an iPhone application and launch it this year. I realized that the first quarter of the year is almost over and I haven’t made any progress on this. The biggest hurdle was the development platform. I’ve tried to install Mac OS X onto my PC several times but it never worked right, so I decided to bite the bullet and get the ball rolling, I spend my hard earned american cash dollars and bought a mac.

I weighted out all my options and decided that the lowest barrier to entry would be the mac mini. I’m not looking to completely switch to mac (yet), I’m planning on keeping my PC going strong and using the mac mini as a development platform.

I was really impressed with the packaging of the mac mini, and the form factor of the actual machine, it’s well…. mini.

macminiruler

It’s going to take a bit if time for me to get the full swing of OS X. I’ve been using windows and ubuntu for so long now that I have an expectation for application behavior, and OS X is throwing some curve balls at me  that I need to get used to. The good thing is that most of my friends, and google are helping me cope and deal with it.

I think it would help if I actually got an apply keyboard to go with it. instead of using my PC keyboard. Too bad that apple doesnt make an ergonomic keyboard like the one I use.

I’m going keep this blog updated with my switching experiance as I slowly easy into the fan boy soaked world that is Apple. iPhone app development, here I come!

back in my day…

By Josh Highland in hardware, Josh's Rambling

floppythought1

In this post I am going to sound like an old man, so be prepared…

Over the weekend, I bought some new hard drives for my computer. They weren’t just any drives, they were the golden fleece of computer storage, TERABYTE DRIVES! My grand total at the check out stand was about $200. $100 per drive, on sale. You might be thinking, “big deal, who care, you can get those any where. whats so special?”. Let me take you on a short journey down my memory lane.

I really got into computers in 1993 (despite the fact that I wrote my first program in 1986). I started to tinker on a pre-built compaq presario that my grandpa had bought me for school. By 1996 I had started to build my own computers, and decided I was going to major in computer science. My physics teacher, Bruce Downey, was some what of a mentor to me in the field of computers. I worked for him as a teachers assistant my senior year. Instead of grading papers, many class periods were spent talking about the latest and greatest computer parts and what we would build if we had enough money. I can clearly remember looking at the back of computer magazines and saying,

I would build a computer that had a terabyte of drive space!

A terabyte was the holy grail of storage. In 1997, a terabyte looked like  a refrigerator, was about 6 feet tall, and required a server room environment to operate in. Not to mention the price tag of over $10,000 dollars. Definitely not for home use, and not something that a 15 year old could afford.

1997_tb

Fast forward to last weekend. It’s early 2009, 14 years after I was drooling over a massive (in size and price) piece of equipment that cost 10x my first car, and there I was, holding not one but 2 of the modern equivalents in my hand, and its common place. Today’s price and weight are a fraction of what a terabyte was in 1997.

2009_tb

The terabyte drive is the first piece of equipment that I can clearly remembering using the phrase, “one day I will own one of them”, with. The impressive part is that a terabyte for $100 is not impressive! The tech industry doesn’t slow down. I’m excited for the future, it’s going to be a whole new game.

So there it is. I am officially old now. I am blogging about the good ‘ol days when hard drives took up rooms, 56k was a “fast” connection, and the portable media was floppy!

I suppose I should shift my dreams to the monster petabyte drives that dominate the server rooms today 🙂
petabyte

JQuery 1.3 domination through deprecation

By Josh Highland in javascript, software, web 2.0

jquery 1.3

On a project I maintain, we recently rolled up to JQuery 1.3.1 from JQuery 1.2.6. Upon doing so, several things instantly broke.

I started seeing errors on lines like this:

if($('input[@name=username]').val() != "")

I decided to check the JQuery 1.3 relase notes to see what had changed.

The first bullet point answered my problem:

The ‘@’ in [@attr] has been removed. Deprecated since 1.2 this old syntax no longer works. Simply remove the @ to upgrade.

As it turns out, the @ style selector was depricated and wasn’t suggested for use when JQuery 1.2 was released, but it was still supported. At 1.3 the @ style selector was removed all together, and as a result broke our code!

Following the upgrade instruction I removed the @ symbol from the selectors, and the code started running again.

The result:

if($('input[name=username]').val() != "")

A simple and effective upgrade, and a reason to closely pay attention to release notes

Finally, a standardized cell phone charger

By Josh Highland in hardware

micro-usb

I have always been bothered by the fact that every cell phone I have ever owned has its own unique charger to go with it. When I buy a cell phone, like most people, I eventually buy a car charger for it. Over the years I have amassed a huge tangled mess of obsolete chargers. I’ve always wondered why the cell phone makers didnt agree on a single standard interface for chargers. It would make life so much simpler for everyone involved. No need for user to hunt for the right charger, or for stores to stock 30+ models, no need for the cell phone makers to re-tool their manufacturing equipment. It just makes sense to standardize.

Today I was happy to read an article announcing that cell phone makers and service providers have reached an agreement to standardize cell phone chargers by January of 2012, according to the GSM Association, which is leading the initiative.

The standardizations initiative backed by both mobile phone manufacturers and service providers and will result in a universal charger based on the Micro-USB interface for new mobile phones.

There are also environmental benefits to standardizing since fewer chargers have to be thrown away. One of the drawbacks will possibly be that when you buy a new phone they won’t get a new charger. Let’s hope that this will reduce the prices all the way around.

So far the mobile phone makers that have agreed to the new Micro-USB standard are

  • LG
  • Motorola
  • Nokia
  • Qualcomm
  • Samsung
  • Sony Ericsson

Lets hope some other companies jump onboard with this and it truly does become a universal standard.

Manually reset your WordPress password

By Josh Highland in hacks, internet, MySQL, software, tutorials, windows, wordpress

lost-wordpress-password

It doesn’t matter what application your working with, losing your password is always a pain in the ass. Luckly if you are working with wordpress (man, I blog a lot about wordpress these days), on your server and you have access to the MySql database, resetting your password manually is a snap.

  • Login to your PhpMyAdmin
  • Select your WordPress database and click on the “SQL” button to open the SQL query window.

wordpress-phpmyadmin

  • Paste the following code in the window textarea. (Don’t forget to modify the password and username before executing it)

UPDATE ‘wp_users’ SET ‘user_pass’ = MD5(‘PASSWORD’) WHERE ‘user_login’ =’admin’;

That’s it! Your password has been reset, and you should be able to login to your wordpress admin area once again.