There have been quite a few, “hate on PHP” articles being posted lately it seems as though the let’s hate on PHP train rolls around every couple of years and the hate articles come out to play. This recent article got a lot of attention, it was well thought out and well-intentioned somewhat but that one single post spurned a new-found hatred towards one of the webs most popular languages from other bloggers.
I’ve been an avid Mediatemple customer for about 4 or so years now. In-fact I still remember 4 years ago Mediatemple having the occasional outage issue, but now they have quite a solid offering that has basically no unscheduled downtime. But recently due to wanting more power I made the move to a 512mb managed Linode VPS plan instead of a Mediatemple DV or VE plan, but why? The grid server plan from Mediatemple is quite good for basic sites but that’s all it is really good for. I hosted about 20 sites on my Grid Server plan, about 3 of those were pretty active blogs with one currently fetching 17,000 unique visitors a month. The Grid Server plan never stopped being a great plan, even though my traffic rose the cheap offering from Mediatemple kept on running without breaking a sweat, in-fact I would be willing to bet running the same amount of sites on Hostgator would have caused some issues.
I just got myself an invite to the popular music service Spotify which has yet to launch in Australia but I’ve been able to obtain access to via n exclusive invite and first impressions are it’s friggen awesome. I used the US version via proxies for a while but then lost access so it feels good to have access to such an awesome service legitimately. It’s so new it won’t let me upgrade to premium just yet and all prices are in euros, so there is still a little work to do but the service works and it’s amazingly smooth and just as fast as if you were playing the music via iTunes.
Recently while doing my daily trawl through Hacker News I came across this blog post titled, Sim Cards Must Die. The article claims that one day we’ll choose phone networks like we do wireless networks and can change plans whenever we want. The sim card is quite possibly one of the best things to have ever been produced and used in the telecommunication industry. Could you imagine buying a phone, then choosing a network like it’s a wifi hotspot only to find your new shiny Apple phone deliberately comes with lack of support for that provider you wanted to use?
Recently I was working on an e-commerce website that had a custom modal box show a Youtube embed. The Youtube video is embedded using an iFrame (seems to be the best approach for embedding) and a close button need to be absolutely positioned above the video to close the modal. After scratching my head for what felt like ages, reading documentation I found the solution. Append ?wmode=transparent to the end of your video URL, see below for an example.
I recently worked on a project where the wonderful jQuery Isotope plugin was needed to sporadically reposition items for depending on the height of the browser and the size of each item being positioned (in my case, unordered list items). Everything was going well, looking great in Firefox and surprisingly IE until I had a look in Google Chrome. Basically what was happening is that some of the items are being stacked on top of each other and looked completely broken, sometimes several of these items would stack. The fix? Well after much trial and error the following code in the main JS script on the site within a DOM ready call was all that was needed. The issue is due to the fact that Isotope applies before everything has loaded, so waiting for the page to load before applying fixes the issue in Chrome and any other browser.
I am a developer, not a designer/developer which to me is a fallacy. There is no such thing as a designer and developer, you’re using two different parts of your brain for both tasks. You’re either a design or you’re a developer. Anyway, that discussion is for another time. Having said that, recently a music blog I operate needed a redesign and because I am cheap and like making things hard on myself, I decided to re-design the entire site myself. You all know my stance on web design, so naturally I used Adobe Fireworks and not Photoshop to design the site.
I think the last straw has been drawn and I’m no longer going to use Firefox as my default web browser any more. The rapid release cycle decision only played a small part in my decision, the main reason is the fight to remove versioning numbers from the browser about box, seriously? Instead of talking about things of substance, there is a current debate whether or not to make Firefox a versionless web browser and just show if you’re using the latest version or not in the about dialogue instead of the version number, the version number will still be available but not shown in the about dialog any more.
This post is not against electric vehicles, I’m all for electric vehicles, but sadly a lot of people don’t truly understand what eco friendly means. Non-harmful and respectful of the environment and its inhabitants, not emitting pollution into the atmosphere. If you think electric cars are truly eco friendly then you’ve been had. Every touts electric cars as being the better alternative and the bonus is they reduce our dependence on oil (which is an awesome thing). However people fail to take into account that electricity is still produced in quite a of countries by non eco friendly means. Not every country has nuclear power (even that can cause troubles with the environment). Australia amongst others rely on coal for electricity generation.
There was an explosion at a factory in Taiwan last week, the factory just so happened to be a Foxconn owned factory that manufactures Apple parts including those for the new iPad 2, did you hear? Apparently 3 people died and 15 were injured, but wait… DOES THAT MEAN WE ALL HAVE TO WAIT LONGER FOR AN IPAD 2 NOW!!!!? That’s what everybody seems to be more concerned about. Never mind 3 people lost their lives, never mind they probably had children or wives/husbands at home. All everyone seems to be concerned with is a delay to the iPad 2 manufacturing process. Seriously, what the fuck?