Archive for October, 2006
New Apple iPod?
Posted on October 12, 2006, under Development.
Yes, I am also a hardware and gadget nerd. Lately there seems to be a lot going on in this space; so I a creating hardware section in my blog to tap into a lot of the exciting things surrounding this area.
Everyone knows that Microsoft is preparing the launch of the Zune, which has been labeled the iPod killer. I currently own a 5G iPod Video, and have been happy with it. However, two things have bothering me since purchasing the device. 1) Everything surrounding the iPod is over priced. 2) Since Apple is the king of the digital music space, they have started to slow down innovation.
Recently I read that Apple is preparing a new Video iPod with wireless and a wide screen features; both features the Zune holds. To me it seems strange that Apple is preparing this release now, all of a sudden when the Zune starts making it rounds in the rumor mills. If Apple had the new iPod Video device near completion, which didn’t they announce it in their last keynote instead of the iTV, a product that’s not even coming out until next year? I feel that Apple might be pushing up the release date of their new iPod because they are scared of Microsoft’s Zune, and I guess they should be. Microsoft is very good at coming to the market late, but with great devices; like the Xbox 360.
It will be interesting to see how the Zune adoption rate is, and what Apple’s answer is to it. If I hadn’t purchased my iPod less than a year ago, then I would look into getting a Zune. However, I feel that part of Apple’s foothold in the digital music domination is iTunes, which will take time for Microsoft to replicate it’s success.
Popularity: 1% [?]
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Quick Snippets: Center a Window
Posted on October 11, 2006, under Development.
It’s been a while since I have done Windows development, and lately I have been dusting of the old libraries and source code. Came across this classic snippet on how to center a window.
[cpp]
// Center in screen
void CenterInScreen(HWND hWnd)
{
// Declare variables
int nScreenWidth;
int nScreenHeight;
int nCenterWidth;
int nCenterHeight;
CRect rcClient;
// Get screen resolution
nScreenWidth = ::GetSystemMetrics(SM_CXSCREEN);
nScreenHeight = ::GetSystemMetrics(SM_CYSCREEN);
// Get dialog size
::GetWindowRect(hWnd, rcClient);
// Calculate new center
nCenterWidth = (nScreenWidth / 2) - (rcClient.Width() / 2);
nCenterHeight = (nScreenHeight / 2) - (rcClient.Height() / 2);
// Set new window position
::MoveWindow(hWnd, nCenterWidth, nCenterHeight, rcClient.Width(), rcClient.Height(), TRUE);
}
[/cpp]
Popularity: 2% [?]
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Monitor Your Server’s Uptime
Posted on October 10, 2006, under Development.
Yup, Google bought YouTube, and said “I told you so” in to many ney-sayers in the form of $1.62 billion. However, it has been all over the RSS feeds and my night news cast, so I am not going to repeat all of that.
Monitoring your web server’s uptime is an important part of web hosting. If not for making sure that your site and services are available to your audience, you are also paying hard earn dollars for your hosting and making sure your hosting company is doing it’s job is important. There are several services I have used in the past, and am currently using to monitor your server’s uptime.
Hyperspin
Hyperspin is my favorite service for monitoring servers. It has servers all over the world, so that you can make sure your site is up no matter what part of the world your visitors are coming from. Hyperspin also has a very easy to use interface, allowing you to setup a new site to monitor in minutes. Hyperspin allows you to be notified immediately via Email or SMS when one or more of your servers goes down. In addition, you can setup different tests including HTTP, MySQL, SQL Server, POP3, IMAP, SMTP, DNS, and other services. In addition, Hyperspin can send you reports weekly or monthly reports for your services. Hyperspin is not free, however it is very affordable and very worth it for the level of service they provide.
mon.itor.us
mon.itor.us is a younger service with less worldwide presence, still none the less the service is good. The interface is a little bit bulky and harder to manage that other services, however they have a neat tutorial video to guide new or confused users. The good thing about mon.itor.us, is that it is free, at least for the time being. The website has a Web 2.0 look, and hold all of the features that other services provide. I feel this service will grow with time, and will hopefully add mode monitor servers around the world to enhance their tests.
Popularity: 2% [?]
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PHP RSS Parser
Posted on October 6, 2006, under Development.
PHP 5 allows one to create a RSS parser in a few simple steps. Unfortunately, most hosting companies are still on PHP 4 or in some cases even lower than that. I came across a great simple and powerful RSS parser called lastRSS.
Features
All RSS versions supported (0.9, 1.0 and 2.0) Transparent cache (doesn’t cache RSS file directly, neither HTML output, but serialized variable; cached data isn’t parsed every time, but you can still access individual fields) pubDate/lastBuildDate conversion to any date/time format Character encoding conversion (all encodings supported by iconv library) Returns an associative array with RSS fields Regullar expression parsing (very quick) Strips HTML from description (both hard-coded and entity-coded) Optional limit the number of returned items Two ways how to proceed CDATA information (get/strip CDATA content) Free open-source software (GNU/GPL)
Sample
[php]
// include lastRSS
include "./lastRSS.php";
// Create lastRSS object
$rss = new lastRSS;
// Set cache dir and cache time limit (1200 seconds)
// (don't forget to chmod cahce dir to 777 to allow writing)
$rss->cache_dir = ”;
$rss->cache_time = 0;
$rss->cp = ‘US-ASCII’;
$rss->date_format = ‘l’;
// Try to load and parse RSS file of Slashdot.org
$rssurl = ‘http://www.freshfolder.com/rss.php’;
if ($rs = $rss->get($rssurl)) {
echo ‘
';
print_r($rs);
echo '
‘;
}
else {
echo “Error: It’s not possible to get $rssurl…”;
}
?> [/php]
Popularity: 6% [?]
1 Comment
Google Code Search
Posted on October 5, 2006, under Development.
Google recently released Google code search, and no unfortunately Google’s source code is not included in the content you can search. This looks like a fairly cool feature for Google, and will probably soon have a link to it from the homepage. However, it may end up like Froogle, where it has been hardly updated since it’s creation, and now isn’t even worthy of a homepage link from Google. Most recently I have been using Krugle, which is everything that you would expect from Google code search and more. It has an amazing interface that once would think was in flash, Ajax Goodness, and is actually usefull with the features it provides. This is the site that Wow’s you when you see it and use it, like most of the stuff from Google used to. In other areas, Koders is a decent code search engine as well.
Popularity: 1% [?]
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Compress Your JavaScript
Posted on October 2, 2006, under Development.
I have been doing some web applications lately, and wanted to compress my JavaScript files so that page loads are quicker. I looked around for applications to do this, and ended up building my own based off of JSMin. I am releasing it to the public for free usage as well. It is a toned down version making it easy to cut and paste your JavaScript and get the compressed results. I am also working on a CSS version that will do the same for CSS files. In the future I would like to build a free desktop application that will compress all of your JavaScript and CSS files in one swoop. I know there are applications out there that do that, but I just want a quick down and dirty way of accomplishing this. In the mean time, compress your JavaScript below:
Compression Level
Input
- - - - - -
Output
Old Size: N/A New Size: N/A Ratio: N/A
Popularity: 23% [?]
