Here’s how to reset your file and directory permissions if PHP is running through FastCGI, suPHP, or LSAPI:

find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

> Does anyone know of an easy way to untar/zip multiple files at once? I
> figure a script is probably the best solution but unfortunately my
> scripting skills are about non-existent at this point.

Learn for loops:

bash$ for i in *.tar.gz; do tar -xvzf $i; done

A priest, a pedophile, and a rapist walk into a bar. He orders a drink.

Provides integration between for the Plupload widget to upload multiple files and Drupal. Plupload is a GPL licensed multiple file uploading tool that can present widgets in Flash, Gears, HTML 5, Silverlight, BrowserPlus, and HTML4 depending on the capabilities of the client computer.

Smartphones were an established consumer-electronics market with devices that people thought were pretty cool, but often frustrating and with serious shortcomings and design flaws.

Then this happened:

Mellan 1959 och 1962 föddes över etthundra barn i Sverige med svåra missbildningar. Skadorna var av ett slag som förlossningsläkarna sällan eller aldrig sett tidigare. Barnen föddes ibland helt utan armar eller ben, andra med händer och fötter nästan direkt fästade på kroppen.
Skador på öron, hjärtan och andra inre organ förekom också och flera barn avled strax efter födseln. Hur många barn som avled före förlossningen på grund av svåra missbildningar under fosterstadiet vet ingen.

Det här hände vid en tid då sådana här barn kallades för vanskapta och många gånger togs de direkt från mammans säng på BB för framtida förvaring på något statligt barnhem.
Barnens mödrar hade alla varit hos läkare och fått Neurosedyn, en liten vit tablett mot oro och illamående, förpackad i en grå plåtask. Tablettens verksamma beståndsdel hade namnet talidomid, ett kemiskt ämne med en dunkel historia, och en dramatisk framtid.



Läkemedelsskandalen som fick sitt svenska namn av Neurosedyn-tabletten skulle ändra radikalt på villkoren för hur man lanserar och testar nya läkemedel i hela västvärlden.
Men den skulle också förändra synen på människor med funktionshinder, för neurosedynbarnen lever ibland oss idag på ett sätt som få trodde att de skulle göra när de föddes för 50 år sedan.
Sammanlagt föddes i hela världen fler än 10 000 barn med olika typer av missbildningar av talidomid.
I den vetenskapliga tidskriften Nature har skandalen kallats det grövsta organiserade brottet i västvärlden efter det andra världskriget.

Git is a distributed version control system. No, you don't need to know what that means to use this guide. Think of it as a time machine: Subversion or CVS without the cruft.
If you make a lot of changes, but decided you made a mistake, this will save your butt.
This guide is for people who want to jump to any point in time with their project/game/whatever, and want something to use for themselves.

JavaScript Blacklist is a simple extension for Safari 5 which blacklists scripts from a configurable list of domains. If a common "utility" script used by sites that you visit is annoying you, this will let you opt out quickly and easily.

When Steve Jobs introduced Apple’s video calling functionality as part of the iPhone 4, I wasn’t all that impressed. However, after last week I’ve had a change of heart.

What is Stay?

If you’re fastidious about keeping your windows tidy, Stay is for you. Stay ensures that your windows are always where you want them to be, even as you connect and disconnect displays.

We received the following photos last night from a person who works with this girl. Her name is Jenny (not confirmed) - we're working our contact for Jenny's last name. Yesterday morning, Jenny quit her job with a (flash)bang by emailing these photos to the entire office, about 20 employees we're told. Awesome doesn't begin to describe this office heroine. Check back as we will be updating if we get more details.

Q: What is this all about?
A: It's about a site called jailbreakme.com that enables you to Jailbreak your iPhones and iPads just by visiting the site.

Since reading Born To Run and following up with additional research, I’m running farther, faster and more comfortably than ever. Previously, my best month’s milage was 45 miles. Since March I’ve averaged over 85 miles per month with July topping 100 for the first time. Last year I ran 375 miles. Physically, I’m sure I could go farther, but nothing in the book helps find more hours in the day. I’ve also shaved about a minute off my average mile without really thinking about speed.

I don’t have a coach and haven’t looked at video myself running (yet), but I have become highly focused on improving my mechanics and efficiency.

Does beautiful design matter?

If you look at the success of some of the most popular sites on the web, it seems to be a mixed verdict. Yes, many have had beautiful designs for years, but for some well-known sites, aesthetics promptly took a backseat to form and function… and stayed there.

And surprisingly, most of their visitors don’t seem to care.

There’s something comforting about a homely design. The average site portrays a kind of “mom and pop” flair that instantly lowers people’s built-in B.S. detectors and says, “Hey, we’re just like you!”

In fact, these ugly sites have gained such a fanatically loyal audience over the years that their owners wouldn’t dream of updating their design today. They pride themselves on a site that may not be much to look at, but it’s incredibly easy to use and understand.

Here are four such sites, as well as lessons we can learn from them:

If anything has made the G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra movie worthwhile, it is this video (yes, way more than my FAQ). It's a Funny or Die song about what the Joes and Cobra troops do on their night off, and it's funny/wacky/zany/whatever.

What happened? Why are you recalling the product?
Two consumers in Japan have found small metal pieces in the padded section of the BABYBJÖRN babysitter’s fabric seat.  After further inspection of the 15 000 babysitters we have in stock, five small pieces of metal have been found in the padding. No incidents have been reported to us, but as safety is always our highest priority, we are undertaking a voluntary recall to repair.

Compass is a stylish compact folding stand that lets you use your iPad in two different modes. First, as an easel, Compass displays iPad in both portrait and landscape modes. Second, flip open the secondary leg and Compass now holds your iPad at the perfect angle to let your fingers fly across iPad’s onscreen keyboard.
Forged from heavy gauge steel, this slim, travel friendly stand lets you enjoy both hands-free and hands-on use of your iPad anywhere your iPad goes. iPhoto slideshows to Keynote presentations, Compass lets you see and do more with iPad. Compass folds up to the size of candy bar, requiring very little space in your backpack, computer bag or purse. Store it in it soft travel sleeve, which matches the Apple iPad case, and you’re ready to go.

If you're like most people who build using Drupal you want to build your site around nodes, that have titles, descriptions, tags, comments, etc. It's no surprise since those types of content oriented sites are the ones that make the world of the web go round. But what about another type of site that focuses not on nodes but on data contained in the Drupal database? Can you do it? Yes. Should you do it? Only if that sort of thing excites you or perhaps if a client requests it.

I'll give you a little background on where I'm coming from and what made me decide to play around with Drupal as a way to expose data sets. About a decade ago I was part of a group of people who built a first of its kind application to send and receive data from wholesale power markets in North America. The application was built on three tiers: a client, an application server, and a database server. The client and application server were written in Java and the database relied on Oracle technology. It was about as far away from open source as you could get. The product was successful though and we did hundreds of installs all across North America. What the product basically did for its owners was suck in data from a central server then expose that data to the user via tables and charts visible from the user interface. At some point last year I started wondering if I could do something similar with Drupal. So I started investigating, tried out different modules and realized that I could do even more with a Drupal install than we did with that product.

There are four tasks that need to be accomplished if you want to use Drupal as an effective data platform.

Capture data to the Drupal database tables
Setting the data types (text, numeric, etc.)
Expose the data to the user using tables and charts
Offer simplified download format options

I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I'd thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.

I found a question/response thread on Hacker News to be quite interesting. The question was “how did your life change after FU money”. FU money being a term for enough money that you have complete freedom to not work.

Paul Graham’s response I felt particularly rang true, and is something to think about. Paul Graham earned his FU money from cofounding Viaweb which later sold to Yahoo.
One thing you learn when you get rich, though, is how few of your problems were caused by not being rich. When you can do whatever you want, you get a variant of the terror induced by the proverbial blank page. There are a lot of people who think the thing stopping them from writing that great novel they plan to write is the fact that their job takes up all their time. In fact what’s stopping 99% of them is that writing novels is hard. When the job goes away, they see how hard.
It sort of goes with the whole cliche that money can’t buy happiness, but it also provides some good insight for people who might see their job as an excuse not to do whatever they really want to do.

When a B&S is some years old it might loose its power and be prone to sudden deaths during mowing. The machine is normally in NO WAY ready for the Appliance's Heaven. The fault is probably easy to repair at a cost of 6 - 8 bucks.

This module adds to each node a field containing the date when it has been
published.

Without this, the only dates available are the creation date and the
update date.

This new field can be used for example in any templates or in any views.

Improved handling of kerning pairs and ligatures in modern browsers using the text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; declaration.

The declaration is currently supported by:
Safari 5, The Webkit Nightlies & Chrome.

Firefox already uses optimizeLegibility by default for text sizes above 20px.

A few years ago it seemed as if Hybrid Hard Drives were the future. Yet after a bunch of announcements and hope today we find ourselves in a world with two distinct markets: HDDs and SSDs. If you're willing to pay the price premium and limit maximum capacity, today's SSDs are very fast and if you choose well, reliable.

For a desktop PC this isn't a tough choice to make. I've been advocating a setup where you have a SSD for your OS + applications and a separate RAID-1 array of 1TB or larger drives for all of your music, movies and photos.

Notebook users don't usually have a ton of drive bays and thus only have room for a single drive. It's not a lost cause though, if your notebook is your only machine you can get away with an internal SSD + external storage whether in the form of a NAS or just something you attach via USB when you're at your desk.

For the very portable users that don't want to lug around another hard drive, or for those who refuse to pay the high dollar per GB rates that SSDs command, there hasn't really been an option other than mechanical storage.



Today Seagate is attempting to change that with its latest Hybrid HDD: the Momentus XT.

Sometimes you wish you could have more control over you cache in order to invalidate it when it is necessary, and be able to invalidate specific parts of the cache that has been updated. One approach to do that is to use Rules together with Cache Actions.

One of the things Drupal core does not do well at all is provide an easy way to switch on a WYSIWYG editor. There is no editor out of the box and setting it up requires some custom configuration of several Drupal core settings, installing and configuring several contributed modules, and also installing one or more external libraries, like the TinyMCE library. The Lullabot book, Using Drupal (O'Reilly), devotes a whole section to describing one way to configure a WYSIWYG editor.

The Problems

It's complicated because there are lots of inter-related parts:

You need to set up one or more roles that can edit content.
You need to create and configure 'Input formats' to create at least one format that allows users to add the html and css needed to create rich text content.
You need to select and install a WYSIWYG editor: install the editor, download an appropriate javascript library and move it to the right location (which varies depending on which editor you are using), and then configure the editor to use the library.
And all of that gets you only to the point where you can edit text. If you want to allow users to upload images and insert them into their text, you also need to identify which of several possible methods of image handling you want to use, and install and configure the modules needed to manage that.

If you've never set a rich text editor up in Drupal before, it can take quite a long time to figure out what to do and do it. Even if you've done it before it typically involves lots of time to navigate to all the needed configuration pages and set each module up appropriately. And once you've done it on one site, there's no easy way to replicate the setup on another site.

So there is a real need for a way to pre-configure as much of this as possible to make it easier to set up and deploy this to other sites, something we can do using the Features module.

If you're one of the lucky ones you managed to secure themselves an iPhone 4 today (or even the past two days if you're really lucky) you've no doubt marveled at how thin it is, how crisp the Retina Display is, and maybe you've even found someone else to do a FaceTime call with… but what about loading it up with some games? Since we haven't gotten our own iPhone 4's yet, we haven't really been able to put together a "games that are really awesome on the iPhone 4" listing, but I figured we'd start out by compiling a list of some of our favorite games in the App Store.

If you think this looks a lot like our 2009 Buyer's Guide, that's because it does. However, we've updated the list with some of our recent favorites and kept some of the old ones. In the interest of space, we had to drop many off the list, but that doesn't reflect the quality of those games. If you're looking for more suggestions, please check out the 2009 Buyer's Guide for additional titles we also loved.

If you want to play games on your new iPhone, you're in for a treat.

By now it seems that most people on the planet have heard of Apple’s latest iPhone, the iPhone 4 which was released today.  One of the many compelling features of the new phone is the Retina Display.  When Steve Jobs first invoked this term at the WWDC, my eyebrows were raised.  Being a retinal scientist, I was immediately skeptical of just what he meant by “retinal display”.  My mind immediately raced and I wondered if it might have been some of the interesting technology I got to see on my last visit to one of Apple’s technology development labs.  I will not say anything about that visit, but this Retina Display, a super high resolution display was new technology that I had not seen before.  Essentially it is an LED backlit LCD display with a *326* pixel per inch (960×640) display (John Gruber of Daring Fireball called this resolution display back in March) where each pixel measures a scant 78μm.    Though as you can see from these images of the displays I captured under a microscope, these pixels are not square.  Rather they are rectangular and while the short axis is 78μm, the long axis on the iPhone 4 pixel is somewhere in the neighborhood of 102μm.  I am including images below of the iPhone 1G, the iPhone 3G, the iPhone 4G and the iPad to show some perspective on pixel sizes.

The recently announced iPhone 4 includes a feature called FaceTime; it's wifi videophone functionality. In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace wrote that within the reality of the book, videophones enjoyed enormous initial popularity but then after a few months, most people gave it up. Why the switch back to voice?

The answer, in a kind of trivalent nutshell, is: (1) emotional stress, (2) physical vanity, and (3) a certain queer kind of self-obliterating logic in the microeconomics of consumer high-tech.

Yesterday, the SSD startup drive in my OS X MacBook became extensively corrupted, such that the computer would no longer boot from it. The process of recovering and repairing the drive revealed a number of important lessons related to recovery preparedness.

I pretty quickly tired of the bright, busy background images for the wallpaper, and so created a few in Acorn.

Add my voice to those saying that the default wallpaper choices for iOS 4 are too busy and high contrast. So, I've made an iPhone wallpaper called Tranquil that will hopefully help with this problem.

Very soon we’ll see the next evolution of LESS. The new change will be bigger than any previous implementation or update because LESS has now been re-implemented in JavaScript. What this means is you no longer need Ruby, ASP or PHP to use LESS, you just need a browser.

Less.js is a JavaScript implementation of LESS that’s run by your web browser. As any JavaScript, you include a link to the script in your HTML, and…that’s that. LESS is now going to process LESS code so instead of including a link to a CSS file, you’ll include a link directly to your LESS code. That’s right, no CSS pre-processing, LESS will handle it live.

I’ve made a new thing, Today’s Guardian, a website that features today’s edition of the Guardian (or the Observer on Sundays). Hopefully it’s as easy to browse through today’s newspaper as it would be with the print edition. It’s made using the Guardian’s Content API. Read on for the thoughts behind it…

Du undrar säkert varför du ska välja just Anonine för att sköta din säkerhet på webben? Här kommer några exempel på varför Anonine är det självklara valet!
Vi sparar inga loggar!
Vi begär inga personuppgifter vid köp!
Stabil och prisvärdig tjänst!
Det finns inga dolda avgifter!

Surfa anonymt
Skydda din integritet på Internet med en VPN tunnel. Detta blir möjligt genom att all trafik mellan din dator och våra servrar är krypterad, varken vi din internetleverantör, arbetsgivare eller FRA kan läsa av denna trafik.

Priser
1 månad 49:-
3 månader 135:-
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12 månader 540:-

OpenVPN med 2048 bits kryptering
Vpntunnel.se använder sig av OpenVPN för att uppnå högsta möjliga säkerhet i nätverket.
Från våra servrar har du sedan full tillgång till Internet precis som vanligt, den enda skillnaden är att du som nu använder dig av vår VPN tjänst blir helt anonym på internet. Det innebär en enorm skillnad eftersom alla dina aktiviteter, eller så kallade elektroniska spår nu inte längre kan kopplas till dig som person.

The world's best time tracking application.
Harvest lets you and your staff track time, log expenses, and create invoices in one simple, integrated workflow. Set yourself or your team up on Harvest in just a few minutes, and instantly start tracking time and expenses. Use the Harvest graphical reports to see the distribution of your company's resources in a visual, intuitive way. Quickly create an invoice, and with just a single click, bill your client. You'll see your revenue come in faster with Harvest. Give Harvest a try and improve your business today.

Nothing to install and nothing to worry about.
Harvest is an online software which means you can use it as long as you have an Internet connection and a modern web browser. There is nothing to install for you and your employees.

Using Harvest is like having your own IT support team built in. The Harvest team monitors the application 24/7 to ensure it is in tip-top shape. Harvest is hosted on secured and reliable servers, and data is backed-up daily.

Who uses Harvest?
Freelancers, small businesses, and professional teams from a variety of industries including designers, architects, lawyers, accountants, non-profits, and universities. Harvest is the perfect tool for individuals and teams who need to track, analyze, and bill for their time.

Russound's C-Series system provides a powerful, expandable and intuitive means to control and enhance your multiroom audio experience. The MCA-C5 Multizone Controller Amplifier, MDK-C5 Multiline Display Keypads and a SRC-C5 System Remote Control provide complete control of up to eight system zones and sources.

Custom audio settings, Party Mode, Do Not Disturb, source and zone linking, and All On/Off participation are standard features. Incorporated in the MCA-C5 is a system clock with an alarms and sleep timers, Home Theater trigger, routed and common IR outputs, and eight 12VDC trigger outputs. Source eight can serve as a paging input and loop output for connection to a third party paging or phone system.

Perhaps today's touchpads are intended to be more fixtures than usable input devices, a signal to the user that he should purchase a quality Bluetooth mouse and stick that in his laptop bag. But why? Over the past 20 months, Apple has shown me quite clearly that touchpads can not only be usable; they can be almost more fun and comfortable to use than a full-blown mouse. PC laptop makers don't seem to realize that aluminum panels and glossy display bezels aren't what make MacBooks great. It's the ergonomics, stupid.

Creators of science fiction are by nature forward-thinking and occasionally prescient, but after rewatching Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers—to my mind the most subversive major studio film in recent (or distant) memory—I now wonder if Verhoeven and his screenwriter, Ed Neumeier, had access to a time machine. Because even though it was produced in 1997—and based on a Robert Heinlein novel from 1959—Starship Troopers is such a clean, strong, almost direct post-9/11 allegory that Verhoeven and Neumeier had to have seen what was coming.

Ibland händer det ju att Apple lanserar funktioner i produkter som inte särskilt många bryr sig om eller bara aldrig använder. Givetvis skiljer det sig hur man använder sin dator från person till person, så jag kan endast utgå från mig själv och från mitt eget sätt att använda min Mac, men det stämmer rätt bra överrens med vad jag noterat hos flera vänner och familjemedlemmar.

Automator i Mac OS X är en sådan funktion, en annan är videochat-funktionen i iChat. Programmet Grab i Mac OS X är det nog få som använder, och är man inte intresserad av Podcasts har man nog aldrig öppnat de verktygen heller som ingår i Snow Leopard.

Jag tror att FaceTime är en sådan funktion.

Sound is fifty percent of the entertainment experience. Great sound can really bring out the power of high definition video. And speaker placement is essential to experiencing the true impact of movies, music and games. THX offers speaker set up and positioning tips for 7.1, 5.1 and desktop speaker systems.

One of my most common feature requests is for Instapaper to periodically download articles in the background. A lot of people forget to launch the app to let it download content before going underground or boarding a plane.

I’ve already received multiple emails from people who are excited for iOS 4’s multitasking because they can’t wait for this to finally stop being an issue, because they think Instapaper will be able to download articles periodically in the background.

It’s painful to respond, crushing their hopes, to tell them that the iOS multitasking system doesn’t allow me to do that.

By naming these features “multitasking”, Apple has set customers’ expectations to include what apps can do in a traditional computer multitasking environment.

It’s going to mislead people into expecting such behavior from apps, but we can’t actually deliver most of it.

I see this comment as a sign that Apple will not fix this, because to the dismay of typography experts (and mine), most people out there without significant reading impairment cater to justified text for aesthetic reasons only. Those are Apple clients, and Apple will please them before the typography experts.

There were two awkward moments yesterday at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference. A few sites have already made much of Steve Jobs' wireless networking difficulties during his demonstration. But the real awkward moment was when Jobs launched into his defense of Apple's app approval process, which was a kind of "take it or leave it" apologia that, for the most part, didn't answer any of the tough questions about why some apps get turned down. 

Jobs' point was to say, in effect, that those who want on Apple's mobile devices can embrace the open world of HTML 5 on the Web, and/or play by Apple's rules to get on the App Store. If you're a company looking for revenue, you've got two options: the big open Web, and the App Store, with its own mysterious brand of capriciousness (and a ton of money exchanging hands). 

You might think that Apple holds both in equal esteem, but its release of Safari 5 shows that Apple has less regard for publishers on the Web than it does for publishers (and developers) it wants to entice to come to the App Store.

After a month of heavy use, I don’t think it’s good for any of those. A more accurate list might be:

I’ll play games on it.1
I’ll check email on it, but not respond much, because that requires a lot of typing.
I’ll check RSS and Twitter on it, but not exclusively.
I’ll read for short periods on it before my hands get tired of holding it.
The iPad is a great device, but what’s it for, really?

Have you ever had a DOM element that you wanted lightboxed, but didn't want all the fanciness of all the lightbox-related plug-ins out there? Lightbox_me is for you.

Lightbox_me is an essential tool for the jQuery developer's toolbox. Feed it a DOM element wrapped in a jQuery object and it will lightbox it for you, no muss no fuss.

I got tired of editing /etc/hosts 20 times a day.


Localghost makes it easy to switch development host names to resolve to localhost with a status item (i.e. system tray) that adds / removes entries from /etc/hosts.

Way back when, computers used to only have command line interfaces. To get a PC to do anything at all, people had to memorize commands, and type them in correctly. But forcing people to memorize commands is not particularly user friendly. As a result, few people knew how to use computers, or wanted to learn.

When graphical user interfaces became popular, people didn’t have to memorize commands anymore. Instead, everything they could do was shown on their screen. «Memorizing» was replaced with «recognizing». No longer did people have to memorize «cp» if they wanted to duplicate a file; they just had to look through the «File» menu and recognize the «Duplicate» command.

SliderNav is a plugin that lets you add dynamic, sliding content using a vertical navigation bar (index). It's made mainly for alphabetical listings but can be used with anything, though longer words look a little awkward (see example 2).

Most phishing attacks depend on an original deception. If you detect that you are at the wrong URL, or that something is amiss on a page, the chase is up. You’ve escaped the attackers. In fact, the time that wary people are most wary is exactly when they first navigate to a site.

What we don’t expect is that a page we’ve been looking at will change behind our backs, when we aren’t looking. That’ll catch us by surprise.

The latest version of Feeds has realtime web feed subscriptions based on PubSubHubbub (PSHB). Here I explain when this could benefit you and how you can set up your site to aggregate news efficiently in realtime.

The iPod was never sold on the grounds of its technical merits: Apple hit a gold-mine by marketing a cool new way of integrating music in your life. Even when Apple announced the iPod with video, it presented it not as the best multi-media player in the universe, but as a cool new way of watching "Desperate Housewives" and other TV shows.

In the seemingly never-ending debate about Apple's successes, announcements, new products and predicted-but-unannounced über-gadgets, features and technical specifications often seem to dominate the debate. Yet if there's one lesson to be learned from the company's recent successes, it is a very simple one: features don't matter any more.

Welcome to the Age of User Experience.

ag läste lite på nätet och upptäckte en typ av skivavbildsfiler som finns i OsX 10.5 som skapar ett filsystem i en katalog med “band” om 8Mb var. När en fil i skivavbilden ändrats är det bara det band som filen ligger i som ändras och det gör att det funkar fint med backup. Med vanliga filsystem i filer så ändras ju hela filen så att backupen måste innehålla hela filsystemet vid varje backuptillfälle.


Bundlen ser ut som en fil i findern

Hursomhelst, så här gjorde jag. Först skapade jag med Skivverktyget en “sparse bundle” (som var översatt till “glest paketerad skivavbild”) krypterad med 256 bitar. Bundlen placerade jag i ~/Secure.sparsebundle jag gav den dessutom volymnamnet Secure.
När Sedan såg jag till att Mail.app var nedstängt. Skivverktyget hade redan automatmonterat det krypterade filsystemet, annars hade jag kunnat dubbelklicka på det för att montera det. Monteringspunkten är /Volumes/Secure. Jag flyttade helt sonika mails datakatalog från ~/Library/Mail till /Volumes/Secure/Library/Mail och sedan skapade jag en symlänk från den nya platsen till ~/Library/Mail

Home control is much more than a universal remote, or smart lighting. Home control is technology that links and controls the electronics and systems in your home – through one easy-to-use interface. At Control4, we believe that life's better when everything works together.

Our flagship app, iTeleport, is priced at $25 on the App Store, and our sales data shows that it's earned more than $1,000 a day.  How did we get here?

The App Store has been out for almost two years now.  There are almost 200k apps and over 38k developers (source).  As the store has grown, one of the prevailing memes has been: you need to have a low price, high volume app to succeed in the App Store.  As the number of apps has grown, visibility has become increasingly difficult, and so the logic is that developers need to get their apps in the Top 100 charts to get visibility, which will then drive volume.  To get into the Top 100, however, you need to drop your prices, because your competitors on the store are willing to do that.  This creates a vicious cycle that drops prices across the board, and makes it very difficult to create a sustainable, long-term business on the App Store without having a "hit" app.  Some have argued that while there are some apps that are successful with a relatively high price, they are all big brands that have their own marketing machines, or get preferential treatment from Apple in getting on the Featured or What's Hot charts.

We'd like to debunk all of these myths.  And we're going to do it with real data.  Our app is called iTeleport (formerly Jaadu VNC).

For the last month or two the Digg engineering team has spent quite a bit of time looking into, playing with and finally deploying Cassandra in production. It’s been a super fun project to take on – but even before the fun began we had to spend quite a bit of time figuring out Cassandra’s data model… the phrase “WTF is a ’super column’” was uttered quite a few times.

If you’re coming from an RDBMS background (which is almost everyone) you’ll probably trip over some of the naming conventions while learning about Cassandra’s data model. It took me and my team members at Digg a couple days of talking things out before we “got it”. In recent weeks a bikeshed went down in the dev mailing list proposing a completely new naming scheme to alleviate some of the confusion. Throughout this discussion I kept thinking: “maybe if there were some decent examples out there people wouldn’t get so confused by the naming.” So, this is my stab at explaining Cassandra’s data model; It’s intended to help you get your feet wet & doesn’t go into every single detail but, hopefully, it helps clarify a few things.

I used Mercurial for three years, but started switching to Git about a year ago. I now grudgingly recommend Git to anyone who intends to be a full-time programmer. Git's interface is bad in many ways, which is the main complaint about it, and it's a legitimate one. It's just an interface, though, and this is a tool you're going to use all day, every day, in a wide variety of situations.

Here are all of the ways that Mercurial has harmed me, or that I've seen it harm others, and the ways in which Git does good where Mercurial does evil:

A few corrections.

You can't simply cat the public key over to a server if you haven't created the ~/.ssh directory first. You have to create the directory first. Also, simply catting it over isn't overly smart, and you could have it refuse to use the key due to insecure permissions. You should be doing:

scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub user@server.com:~/
ssh user@server.com
mkdir .ssh && chown 0700 .ssh
mv id_rsa.pub .ssh/authorized_keys && chmod 0600 .ssh/authorized_keys
And you're right, the key needs to be on the other end first, before you get this dialog because this is add the key to the running ssh-agent. If there is no pubkey negotiation, ssh-agent isn't consulted at all, you're providing a straight password to the remote sshd server.

3. Removing Keywords from Multiple Images
As much as I try not to do dumb things, I sometimes mis-label animals and plants in groups of images or misspell keywords. If you look under the menus, the only "remove" commands for keywords will either remove the keyword if it's in the current keyword set or remove all keywords from the image. It's possible to remove individual keywords from individual images by using the "Keywords" button in the metadata inspectur, but It's not very clear how you can remove one specific keyword from multiple images, without first adding it to a keyword set. However, there is a way to just remove 1 keyword

1. Press shift-D if necessary to show the keyword controls in the control bar.
2. Select the photos with the unwanted keyword in the browser
3. Put focus on the keyword entry field in the control bar either by clicking in it or by pressing option-`. You could also select "New Keyword" from the Metadata menu.
4. Slowly begin typing the unwanted keyword in the field. Aperture autofills the keywords. I usually type only the first few letters; Aperture presents a list and I use the up and down arrows to select the keyword. Note that you haven't pressed enter or return yet.
5. Press shift-return to remove the keyword from all of the selected photos. If you had pressed just return, then Aperture would have added the keyword to the photos. Shift-return does the opposite.
6. Notice that focus is still on the keyword field. Press enter or escape to exit the field. It can be frustrating to forget the focus is in there as you press keys to do other things. I do that all the time.

While there are many changes for the better in the HTML5 specification, there is no better bang for the buck for the data driven website than the transformation of forms. These simple changes will transform how you enter, validate, process, and even display inputs. You will be able to create more usable web applications with less code and less confusion.

While Webkit-based browsers have had CSS Transitions since Safari 3.1.2, other browsers are only just now coming out with nightly builds supporting this exciting new part of the CSS3 specification.

With all browsers except for IE being slated to have Transitions support in the coming months, more and more web designers are turning to this powerful technique as a means to enhance their website’s user experience.

There is only one problem: many of us have never created animations in JavaScript, Flash or some other environment before, and are therefore not as well-versed in the unwritten rules of the animation world.

Someone, who can be identified as Darwin9 in the chat room, sent me a “How to Move the Home Folder in OS X Leopard.” I hadn’t done it yet, but it’s something that I was hoping to do for my next installation.

iPad apps are inconsistent and have low feature discoverability, with frequent user errors due to accidental gestures. An overly strong print metaphor and weird interaction styles cause further usability problems.

jScrollPane is a jquery plugin which allows you to replace the browsers default vertical scrollbars on any block level element with an overflow:auto style. You can easily control the apperance of the custom scrollbars using simple CSS.

jScrollPane is crossbrowser, working on all browsers that support jquery and it also degrades gracefully. If a user's browser doesn't support jQuery or has JavaScript turned off then they will see the browsers default scrollbars. If the mouse wheel plugin is included in the page then the scroll panes will respond to mouse wheel events as well.

jScrollPane is built on top of the awesome jQuery library and optionally utilises the mouse wheel plugin and the jQEm plugin

I am widely credited as the inventor of the <blink> tag.   For those of you who are relatively new to the Web, the <blink> tag is an HTML command that causes text to blink, and many, many people find its behavior to be extremely annoying.    I won't deny the invention, but there is a bit more to the story than is widely known.

An open schema. In the early days, our database was a very traditional kind of relational database. We had a table for links, a table for users, and a table for comments. The columns in the database were what you’d expect. Everything was normalized. This would be an example of the link table. There were IDs and the number of up votes and the number of down votes, and then title, URL, and tons of foreign keys and these complex mini relationships. We spent a lot of time thinking about the database and working on it.

It seemed okay at the time, but there were a lot of problems looking back. One of the things was we spent too much time thinking about the database. We really shouldn’t have to do that. Every time we added a feature, when you can save links, or hide links, or when we added commenting – we didn’t have that at first – we had to update our schema.

This one is most definitely off-topic, but you might find it interesting.

Last Sunday, I broke down and bought a non-3G iPad.  I just was too damn curious.  Walked into the Apple Store, played with it for 5 minutes, gave them my credit card, and walked out 15 minutes later. 

Brought it home, set it up, downloaded some interesting stuff, and had a blast.  Big geek fun.

I then went off to work for the week, and left it home.  And that's when things got interesting ...

Online payments are a bitch.  Just over a decade ago, you had to hook up your online commerce system to an actual terminal that would send bleeps and bloops to the gateways, but even today, it's not much better.  There are still a plethora of players who have to touch your information to process a simple credit card transaction, and each and every one of them gets to take a little bit of your money and introduce their own technical hassles.  While there are never any easy answers - every option has pretty severe tradeoffs - I'm going to try to shed some light on how the process works and look at some of the major players/options you have for accepting payments on your website.

I went to buy Angry Birds on Topherchris’ recommendation and got this:

The first two are real. Rocket Bird 3D and MY BEST FRIEND are other things (although probably keyword spammers). The other six of the top ten results for this game’s name are pure spam. Judging from the number of customer ratings, a lot of people are downloading them — and, reading the reviews, it looks like they’re mostly scams and ripoffs.

I’ve been playing around with the newest addition to Google Docs, Google Drawings, and I’m quite liking it. I tried drawing a few diagrams and even a wireframe, and it turns out the basic drawing interactions are just as good – in some cases even better – than what I’m used to in Omnigraffle and Fireworks.

A simple workflow diagram on how to use Mercurial.

Try adding list-style-image:none; to .rightcommunity li and
> .rightcommunity li a. It appears to be inheriting the list-style-image from
> the #newslist selector.

Personally, I find the iPad very interesting for many reasons, though most of them are probably different than what excites the average consumer. One of the aspects I find most exciting is that the iPad (and iPhone) represent a new platform that has been designed from the ground up in such a way that they can avoid a number of the security problems that have plagued computers in past, problems that cannot be fixed because legacy operatings need to support legacy applications that cannot be made to work securely. This is a key advantage of these new platforms, but it is also one that could easily evaporate if Apple is not careful as it designs and implements new APIs.

In this post I am going to walk through a brief history of computer security, an explanation of why iPhone OS can be more secure than Mac OS X or Windows, describe some API flaws in iPhone OS 2.x/3.x that reduce user security, and explain potential exploit vector in iPhone OS, and ways they can be fixed. Finally, I will take a quick look at some of the features announced at the iPhone OS 4.0 event, and their potential security and privacy implications, though I will not discuss their actual APIs or any specific analysis I have done.

Twitter has become hugely popular and is only getting bigger. Some users don’t understand that the formatting and content of their tweets has a huge impact on how well or poorly they are received as individuals, and by extension, how likely they are to be followed.

I participate extensively on Twitter with my personal account: @danielpunkass, and my company account: @redsweater. One of my applications, @marsedit, also tweets with a mind of its own.

I have strong opinions about what works well on Twitter, and what doesn’t. I decided I would start writing down these opinions so that I can easily reference them in the future. This advice is as much a memorandum to myself as to any readers who might feel that I am preaching to them. I violate most of these recommendations on a regular basis, but I hope that writing this guide helps me to do so less often.