When I look through various web hosting sites, one thing is almost always made apparent is the fact that they offer cPanel as the hosting panel software. When Robin and I started thinking about offering web hosting services at Idlesoft, we also followed the crowd and decided to use cPanel.

Now, no business is successful when it first begins, and Idlesoft is no exception (in fact, we’re still in the red from past mistakes). After realizing that every month we only had a few dollars coming in, and 15 dollars going out to pay for the cPanel license, we knew it was important that we change. So, we setup Virtualmin along with Webmin, and we were ready to move on. Virtualmin offers many of the core features cPanel provides, plus a few extra features. Best of all, it’s free. In fact, there are many free or open source hosting panels out there, which means that there are that many more reasons why you should not use cPanel.

Now, this post was not meant to bash cPanel, or promote its alternatives. This post was written simply to make the point of not buying based on brand name. Not convinced? I’ll use a different example: clothing. Many teenagers today wear name brand clothing like American Eagle and Armani. As for myself, I go out to the nearest retail store and buy whatever is out on display. Instead of paying for the massive markup the brand brings, I get comfortable clothes at a price that is also comfortable for my wallet.

I hope you got my point, don’t waste money on cPanel, other software, or any other product because of it’s brand name.

So in my last WicketPixie-related post, I talked about replacing images with pure CSS. In this blog post, I’m going to practically tell you I will not be working on WicketPixie until further notice.

The backend for WicketPixie right now is just a mess. As I went through it trying to clean it up, I found even more tangled code that basically forced me to add more mess back in. I believe it to be impossible to edit the code in its current state and call it 2.0. Therefore, I am going to back out of WicketPixie development until I have a large amount of time to sit down and either do a rewrite or a major refactor.

Now, this move has one big advantage. WordPress 3.0 will be out soon. Basing WicketPixie 2.0 off of WordPress 3.0 would mean a fresh API to build off of. Also, WicketPixie must be modified in order for it to work with WordPress MU installs. This would not be the case with WordPress 3.0, as WordPress MU is being merged into the WordPress core at this very moment. This along with many other features will make it worthwhile to wait for 3.0’s release.

That’s all then, I can’t wait to start back up developing this awesome WordPress theme again.

Awhile back, I did a little review on a WordPress application for Android called wpToGo. It worked quite well, and I had no real problems with it.

So, as I browse the latest social apps added to the Android Market, one application by Automattic, Inc. caught my eye. WordPress for Android has been released, boys and gals. Just like with the other app review, I am starting this one via the app itself. It gives me a good amount of room to view what I am typing, so I haven’t found the need to switch over to the desktop yet. Speaking of posting, it comes with expected features like bolding, italicizing, linking, block-quoting, and adding pictures to posts. It also allows you to read comments made to your blog from your device, and also approve/disapprove/spam comments at the whim of your fingertip.

One really useful feature I am glad it has is comment notifications. Of course, I get those notifications via email, but having them come directly from the app is nice because I do not have to wait for the admin page to load before I can moderate the new comments.

Finally, you also have the option of viewing and editing pages, but I do not use those much, so it is just another tab for me.

After heading over to the WordPress for Android site and reading their recently posted “WordPress for Android 1.0 Released” article, I discovered why the UI and features felt so familiar. It turns out that the source code for wpToGo was used as the basis for WordPress for Android. This is just another beautiful thing about open-source code, it can be found and be opened up to a much broader audience than before. Just as a side note, wpToGo has been discontinued. Have no fear though, he has been working alongside the folks at Automattic on WordPress for Android for the past few months now.

This is version 1.0.0, so I really didn’t expect much from the get-go, but it’s off to a great start (no doubt due to the awesome features wpToGo provides). If your interested in beta testing cutting edge versions of WordPress for Android (I know I was), you can head on over to their forums at http://android.forums.wordpress.org/ and post a reply in the beta testing topic.

And for those that enjoy videos, here’s the official video of WordPress for Android created by the folks at Automattic:

As the blog posts recorded in my blog have begun to pile up, I have come to notice something. I find myself returning to old posts that walk-through how to do something. For example, one-time configuration changes when you first install Ubuntu or setting up the connection between your Ubuntu computer to your T-Mobile G1. Shame on me of course, I wrote those articles, so I should already know how to do those things by heart. Unfortunately, I am slow at memorizing, so after I return to these articles a few more times I believe I will have gotten the processes described in the posts down.

Anyways, when trying to come up with a blog post idea, write about a solution to a problem you found. Many times I was about to do this, but decided against it because I thought it was not worthwhile. I kick myself now, because there are times when that problem arises again, and I completely forget how I solved it the first time. I end up spending a long time on Google to find the solution again.

Even if the post is a short and simple one, it may prove invaluable to someone out there and possibly useful to yourself as well.

Yesterday, courtesy of UPS, my new solid-state drive (SSD) arrived. I was going to do a video unboxing, but decided not to because there really was not much to see. Anyways, I bought this SSD as an upgrade from my 250GB mechanical hard disk. Obviously, size was not the deciding factor here, speed was. I now use the SSD as my boot disk, and there is enough room to keep most of my data on it as well. The 250GB hard disk is now used for extra data space and my Windows disk (I don’t need the speed boost there, I rarely boot into it).

The OCZ Vertex Turbo 30GB drive has read speeds up to 240 Megabytes per second and write speeds up to 145 Megabytes per second. This is compared to my mechanical hard disk with read speeds of around 60 Megabytes per second and even slower write speeds. Now, what makes the Turbo different from the original Vertex series? The 64MB of cache used by the drive has been overclocked from 166MHz to 180MHz. This boost definitely provides a smoother ride for everyone.

I run Linux. Aside from that phrase just being ridiculously awesome, it also means that I use special utilities like sreadahead, which helps the operating system during boot, leading to faster boot times. The sreadahead utility also benefits from SSDs’ speeds. My system used to take around 50 seconds to boot, including BIOS. Now it boots in half the time. Now I do not have to be so grumpy when I need to reboot, because being the impatient geek I am, every second away from my desktop is agony.

I also noticed a performance boost during package updates. Ubuntu’s dpkg software processes and configures packages three times faster than it use to take. This means that now, my bottleneck is my internet connection, a measly 8Mbit downlink that is further cut in half by our old wireless hardware.

Physically, SSDs are unbelievable. I never thought I would see an internal data storage component to be so light while staying sturdy. I am confident that I could drop it a thousand times and it would retain all my data (I can not guarantee the floor will come out looking spotless, unfortunately).

That wraps up the short review of this awesome SSD. If you are interested, go ahead and get in on the SSD game yourself.

Lately, services have popped up like dot.tk and co.cc that offer free domain name services. Likewise, services such as 000webhost.com offer free web hosting. Many new bloggers have started using these services together. I personally have registered my domain name “eddieringle.com” through Gandi.net, and also host this blog through Idlesoft’s hosting service.

Let’s start with using free domains. These ultimately hurt your blog because as these services gain in popularity, it will also become known to most that you are using a free service, which could possibly make your blog feel “cheap.” It is better to find a good, quality domain that represents your blog or brand, and buy it up before someone else does. They are not that expensive, just a few dollars per year.

Using free hosting can also lead to a “cheapish” feel to your site as well. For example, most services handle 404 errors by redirecting a visitor to their site, causing you to lose a reader. They also can’t guarantee the best technology available like PHP or Ruby on Rails. If they do offer that software, it will most likely be limited. As far as blogging goes, using a free service may restrict you from using pretty URLs, leading to poor SEO and an even higher loss of potential readers.

Seriously, spend the extra few dollars to get quality and worthwhile services, your readers and your blog will thank you.

Note that I put “Strategies” in quotations up in the title, because Twitter was created to let people who are interested know what you are doing. In that case, a word like “style” or “method” would be more appropriate. I recently unfollowed almost everyone I was previously following on Twitter, because I had reevaluated my priorities and accepted Twitter’s true purpose as I described in the first sentence of this post. As I describe this decision, I will also point out a few “strategies” I have seen people use on Twitter.

1. The You-Scratch-My-Back-And-I’ll-Scratch-Yours Strategy – This seems to be the most common follow strategy I have seen on Twitter, and it’s the one I used pretty much since I joined Twitter. It is a reasonable method: if someone follows you, return the favor and follow them back. The good part of this strategy is that it is a win-win outcome for both users, as both get a new follower. The downside really will not become apparent until you have amassed a long list of people who you follow and who follow you back. This leads to saturation of your Twitter stream, which is means you will have a hard time finding the tweets important to you.
2. The Follow-Loads-Of-People-And-Then-Unfollow-Them-All Strategy – This is used by many people who take advantage of the people using the strategy above to get a large follower base, then use their new follower count to make it look as if they are marketing geniuses in order to sell a product or just to brag about their large follower base. My advice, don’t try this strategy, it just doesn’t make you look good.
3. The Follow-Who-You-Want-To-Follow Strategy A.K.A. Twitter’s Purpose – This is the strategy I recently switched to because as I said before, I previously used the first strategy but became annoyed by the difficulty of finding quality tweets in my Twitter stream. Of course, some people may be disappointed when they follow you but do not get followed back, but you will stay happy knowing that you followed the people you have because you are genuinely interested in the information they provide.

So maybe this is more of a protest to get people to rediscover the reason why Twitter was created. If that is what you want to think, fine with me. All I am doing is explaining why I unfollowed tons of people while providing my Twitter follow observations as well. By the way, if you are interested in what I have to say, follow me on Twitter.

Ah, it is Christmas Break at last, and that means it is time to get cracking on WicketPixie 2.0!

I decided not to release version 1.2. While it was working properly (I am running a Release Candidate on my blog right now), Chris, myself, and others agreed on the fact that it was getting cluttered and unorganized.

I started work on 2.0 awhile back, and I have already made some local changes waiting to be finished. But my primary goal is to make 2.0 as fast and clean as possible, so I am starting with the frontend theme.

The current design uses images for just about everything you see, the rounded frame, the topbar, the drop shadows, etc. The latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari all support CSS3’s border-radius and box-shadow properties, which means lightweight CSS can be used in replace of bandwidth-heavy images. The final two major browsers, Opera and Internet Explorer, do not support CSS3 as of yet, so a different solution must be used. Luckily, WordPress includes the awesome jQuery JavaScript library, which is extendable through plugins. A few of those plugins allow for rounded borders and box shadows on browsers without the CSS support. I have not decided on one specifically, but I have got a few under consideration.

The reason why I want to get most of the images out of the design so badly is page load times. I ran two benchmarks on both this blog and the master branch of WicketPixie, and images consisted of about 7% of each site’s load time. That might not seem like much to some of you, but think of it this way: If your server is located in one part of the world, the latency between that server and your visitors can be really high, so we want to save all the bandwidth we can.

That’s it for now, hope you enjoyed this developer blog and I hope I can post another one soon.

We all need a bit of motivation every once and awhile. I, personally, have felt, at times, that my blog was going nowhere fast. I like to think of myself as an optimist, but I realized that I was not looking at my blog optimistically.

Here is a big tip: Never start a blog and simply say that you want thousands of visitors and thousands upon thousands of daily page views. Never do that, because that is not how it works. You have to work you’re way up, gradually.

So, you can have that as your big goal, but once you have set that big goal, do not pay attention to it. Instead, set many small, easily obtainable goals. For example, I decided recently that I want to average 5000 monthly page views. A few months ago, I reached that goal, but I did not move on. I was curious, so I waited for the next month, and it so happened that I did not get 5000 page views that month. So, I worked a little bit harder the following month (which was last month, November.) When the statistics came in, I still had not hit 5000 page views. Now, if I work just a little bit harder (and stop slacking off when it comes to post schedule,) I could probably hit 5000 monthly page views again.

Sure, this is not a “success story” sort of post, but that is not my point. I reached 5000 before, I can do it again. When the day comes that I find I have hit 5000 again, maybe I will start planning for my next goal (10000 monthly page views, anyone?) Hopefully you understand what I am saying. Countless times in my life I have set big goals only to see them fall apart in my face. I have learned to set smaller goals that you can work for without worrying about them too much. I hope you learn this as well, just not the hard way.

I like cutting edge stuff. I frequently check for updates for everything I use because I want to make sure I have the latest and greatest features (and not to mention bug fixes). However, most people are nervous when it comes to updates, especially testing updates before they are released as stable. Back when Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala was in it’s Alpha stages, I went ahead and began using it. Of course, I experienced the occasional glitch or bug, but for the most part it ran perfectly fine. The added bonus was the extremely frequent updates, which quenched my thirst for my cutting edge obsession.

Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx is the next release of Ubuntu due out in April 2010, but Lucid has not even reached it’s first Alpha (which is scheduled to land around December 10th), so why would anyone dare to try it now? Well, hopefully you know that Ubuntu is based off of the Debian distribution of Linux. At the beginning of development for every new release, the Ubuntu repositories are synced up with the Debian repositories. So a few weeks ago when development on Lucid began, it was essentially the same as Debian (same packages anyway). Usually, the repositories are synced up with Debian’s unstable repositories, but the difference now is the fact that Lucid is an Long Term Support (LTS) release. Because of this, the Ubuntu repositories were instead synced up with Debian’s testing repositories (don’t believe me? This post says so). The testing repository is much more reliable than the unstable repository, and it’s obvious why the Ubuntu developers used it for an LTS release.

Before I used Ubuntu full-time, and after my introduction to Linux through SuSE, I used Debian. I always used the testing repositories, as they satisfied my need for the cutting edge while at the same time were stable enough for daily-use. While I haven’t switched over to Lucid yet (I am still going to wait for the first Alpha release, just to be safe), I am confident that it is already pretty stable. Of course, I do not recommend that Linux newbies make this sort of switch, because there is still a danger of possibly putting yourself in the position where you need to reinstall Ubuntu on your computer entirely.

I personally am excited for Lucid Lynx, how about you?

If you are like me, then good content is hard to come by. You could have writer’s block for a period of time, or just have no inspiration whatsoever at times. It is important to keep visitors happy with new and refreshing content, and not the same old posts they read during their last visit. But there are also periods where you have a few great ideas for blog posts, and you write them all and feel great about it (I’m in the middle of one of those periods right now).

So, when you do have all these posts lined up, don’t post them all at once. This can overwhelm your visitors and more importantly, leave you without good content in case of another writer’s block. Think about what that could do to your blog. If you lose the steady stream of visitors you worked so hard for, what was that work worth now? And if you are just awesome and rarely get writer’s block, what if you go on vacation and are unable to post to your blog, so you post them all at once before you leave?

The solution is careful planning and scheduling. Most blog platforms support post scheduling nowadays. I have already scheduled the two previous posts of mine, and this one was most likely scheduled as well.

You can even take it a step further and plan out when your posts should go live. Take a look at Google Analytics’s Visitor Trending page (Visitors -> Visitor Trending -> Visits) and sort by Hour to see which hour of the day your visitors visit your blog the most. Once you’ve got a good idea, plan around that. I get most of my visitors late in the afternoon (3-4PM), so I might want to schedule a post to publish before then, maybe around lunchtime. Then, when my visitors check my blog after they’re run to McDonald’s (or wherever they decide to eat), they can sit down and read my post while those french fries digest.

In the end, it is up to you. If you really feel like it, post all of those good reads at once. Hopefully you are one of those people who do not experience the frequent writer’s block that I am plagued with. And if you still manually publish your posts, with tons of them waiting for their chance to shine, I recommend getting to know the scheduling feature of your blog platform.

With Black Friday upon us, I have taken a closer look at the financial side of this holiday season. Due to the economy, people just can not spend as much as previous years. Some will be lucky to get gifts of any sort, let alone get what they want. Now, you’re about to get some advice on spending your money wisely, from the viewpoint of a 15-year-old.

Know What You Are Buying

Usually this would come later in an article of this sort, but I feel that it is important to know what you are buying for someone before you make any plans. Was this person specific about a certain model? If so, what are the reviews like on that product? Is there a better brand or style that works better? You have to make sure that what you are buying is what you think you are buying.

Set Your Price

Do not be intimidated by the deals and the prices out there. You are in control of your wallet, so be responsible with it. Know your money, and set a price cap that won’t come back to haunt you later on. This price cap could be per item that you are buying, per person you are buying for, or any other way you can think of to divide up your overall holiday budget. You’ll be glad you did, and once you do it successfully one year, you will probably repeat the process the next year.

Hunt Down The Deals

Now this is the part that is most common in these types of posts, but it is an important one. Do not get lazy and buy it without shopping around first. Every year, my parents look through a giant stack of newspapers and keep their eyes open for good deals. This year they got a great deal on a gift for my grandparents, and just in case they happen to read this post, I won’t tell you what it was (it’s one of those “Do Not Blog-About ‘Til Christmas” sort of deals).

Aside from newspapers, you can find tons of savings on the web. There are many sites out there that allow you to compare prices between many different stores and web shops (PriceGrabber and Google Product Search are the two I use most often). Also keep in mind the vast collection of coupons out there. If you want to check for coupons on a certain product quickly, I recommend coupons.lockergnome.com.

Step Back, Double-Check Yourself

It is easy to get caught up in the excitement of the holidays. I’ve seen it happen personally, so much in fact that I  have made this my final tip. Before you hit ‘Submit’ on that order or visit the cashier, double-check everything in your cart and make sure that you 1) are positive this is what you meant to buy, 2) haven’t gone over the budget, 3) are positive that you have gotten the best deal. I can’t stress how important this double-check is and how important it is to stick to your plan.

Happy Holidays!

I hope my first big tip post helped you. Before I end this post, I want to make sure you always remember that it’s the thought that counts and hope you have a great holiday season!

When I am bored, sometimes I might head over to Ustream.tv to check out what people are streaming about. When I got my G1, part of me wanted an application that would allow me to at least view Ustream.tv streams on the go. Well, it appears like the broadcaster has been out for some time now, and the viewer has just now been released to the Android Market. I went ahead and tried both of them out, and was pleased with the quality of the streams and amazed at the smoothness of the broadcaster. After all, this is a mobile device we’re talking about here! I went ahead and recorded a YouTube video that quickly goes over the features of both applications. Excuse the blurriness, as the Flip Mino HD does not support any sort of Macro. And yes, I’m getting over a bug, which explains the cough.

Both applications are simple to use. The Broadcaster application allows you to first select whether you want to just record videos for your Ustream.tv account, or take it live. Once live, you have the option to enable a simple poll, which appears on viewers’ screens, handy for taking a quick survey. The Viewer is also pretty straightforward. You can choose between live streams, previously recorded videos, or your own videos, with the option to search through streams and videos as well. Once you select which stream/video you would like to play, it opens up full-screen on your Android device. While the smoothness of playback depends on your connection speed, the video is played at the same quality as it would be on your desktop.

I am really glad that Ustream.tv finally pushed both these applications out the door, as I will have one more thing to do whenever I get bored.

I have always been interested in efficiency and performance. So much, in fact, that when I finished installing three different trunk (latest source code) builds of Firefox (3.5.6, 3.6, and 3.7), I just had to compare their JavaScript performance with that of Chromium. I have heard that the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine got some performance boosts in 3.7, and wanted to find out for myself just how fast the engine was and if it was faster than Chromium’s V8 JavaScript engine. The defacto JavaScript benchmark seems to be the SunSpider test, so I went ahead and used that. I was about to use the V8 Benchmark Suite, but decided against it because it was more of a benchmark for the V8 developers when they are improving V8’s performance.

The following results show the time it took to complete the SunSpider tests +/- the 95% confidence interval.

Chromium (Build 33067): 1068.8ms +/- 17.8% [SunSpider Results]

Firefox 3.7a1pre Nightly: 1853.8ms +/- 15.3% [SunSpider Results]

Firefox 3.6b5pre Nightly: 5239.2ms +/- 2.8% [SunSpider Results]

Firefox 3.5.6pre Nightly: 5420.2ms +/- 15.7% [SunSpider Results]

Using SunSpider’s nifty comparision feature (and you can try it yourself with the links provided), I found that Chromium’s V8 engine was significantly faster than all of the TraceMonkey engines in all tests, except for the engine included in 3.7a1pre, where a few tests (mostly math related ones) were inconclusive.

Just for the heck of it, here’s a nice graph I made with Google Docs (click on it to see a bigger version):

It looks as if the speed gap between V8 and TraceMonkey is slowly closing. Of course, I expect nothing less from the open source community.

UPDATE: Mariano posted a comment asking about the computer specs and operating system, so here they are:

• AMD Athlon X2 5200+ (~2.7GHz)
• 6GB DDR2 800 RAM
• Asus EN9500GT TOP
• Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

Ever since I installed Ubuntu on my computer, I have had issues with Flash objects. Half of the time, I was unable to click on certain parts of Flash objects, like the video controls in some YouTube videos, for example. For the longest time, I thought that the problem was due to the fact that the 64-bit Adobe Flash plugin is in it’s alpha stages, but recently I discovered the real culprit.
It turns out, Compiz interferes with how the system gets information from my mouse, causing the failed clicks. Simple solution is to turn off Compiz, and the problem disappears.

For me, this came with a new problem. Gnome Do’s Docky requires compositing in order to work, so without Compiz enabled, I was left without a dock (and I like my dock). As uninformed as I was, I didn’t know that Gnome’s own Metacity had a compositing manager bundled with it, so I enabled that and I saw my dock once more. Just to be safe, I tested that Flash objects still worked. They did.

So, how can you go about disabling Compiz and enabling Metacity’s compositing manager? Read on.

1. Click on System->Preferences->Appearance and then navigate to the Visual Effects tab.
2. Select ‘None’ and close the window.
3. Open up a terminal window and run the command:

gconf-editor

4. In the left tree pane, navigate to apps->metacity->general and find compositing_manager in the list on the right.
5. Enable the compositing_manager option and close the window.
6. Restart the X Server or just log off and log back for changes to take effect.

Sorry I haven’t posted lately, been busy with school and such. Nevertheless, the world has been developing without me, and Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala has been released today. I began using the early alphas back in late Spring/early Summer, and have personally witnessed 9.04 (Jaunty) change from an operating system with various issues *cough*pulseaudio*cough*, to a very polished and clean one. After discussing things over with my buddy in the Netherlands, Robin Vermeij, I have considered switching over to KDE. I recently upgraded my RAM from 2GB to 6GB, so memory usage is not much of a problem for me anymore. Anyway, Robin has cooked up two solutions that fix two annoying issues in Kubuntu:

While GTK theming has mostly been solved on Kubuntu, there are still a few issues.

Problem #1: Using kdesudo/gksudo/sudo themes still look ugly
Solution:

and select qtcurve

Problem #2: Qtcurve’s font is much too big
Solution: Change the general font in systemsettings->appearance->fonts to something different, save, and then change it back. Repeat for `kdesudo systemsettings`.

Last night, I found out that one of my dad’s friends got a new phone, the Hero. Since I’m the resident Android guy around here (I <3 the G1), he wanted me to show him all the cool stuff about it. He hadn’t even linked a Google account with his device, so he didn’t know about the Market and the tons of apps there were available. He was just ecstatic that he could watch NFL videos from his phone.

So I walked him through creating a Google Account, and linked it up with his device. Then, after showing him Google Sky Map on my phone, he wanted it (of course). So I showed him how the Market works, and downloaded Sky Map for him. My dad told him about the Bubble level application, and he was in disbelief after I downloaded it for him and showed him how to use it (he said he would walk into work the next day to test it against a professional level).

Now here’s my part of the story. As I held the Hero, it felt really nice. Others have mentions that the G1 feels plastic-like and toy-like, and I didn’t believe them until I held the Hero. It feels like a sturdy, clean phone. It’s light and thin, thanks to the lack of hardware keyboard. I still would never dream of a phone without a hardware keyboard, even though Android’s software keyboard works very well. It has a 5 megapixel camera, which produces masterpieces compared to my G1’s 3 megapixel camera. I had never used HTC Sense (HTC’s proprietary user interface for Android) before, so it took me a second to rediscover how to access things. That brought me to the buttons below the screen. They are beautiful! They look as if they are just labels on a smooth plate of steel, and your very touch activates them. The trackball is also very polished, and very nice to scroll with.

So, I learned a few things last night. First, you will be the envy of everyone if you get an Android phone, especially the Hero. Second, it’s very easy to convert someone to Android, with it’s countless applications and features. Lastly, I found that I am able to eat a huge Buffalo burger.

Awhile back, I wrote a quick howto on the settings you need to get your Android-powered device recognized by Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) [eddieringle.com/debugging-your-android-application-on-the-g1-or-any-android-device-in-ubuntu-904/]. Now that 9.10 (Karmic) is almost ready for release, you will need some modifications to that udev file:

Notice the change in the second part from SYSFS to ATTRS. Other than that, not much has changed. Before it works properly, you may need to rename that rule file with a higher prefix number, I had to. At first I had it set at 50 and it was working, but after upgrading to Karmic I increased it to 99 (who wants to test all the numbers between 50 and 99, right?).
Remember, restart the udev daemon using the following command:

Enjoy your Android device (and Karmic)!

Before I registered eddieringle.com, I intended on registering ringle.com, for the sake of keeping things short. (I suppose this blog’s URL would be Pirillo-style: eddie.ringle.com.) Unfortunately, like many domain names, ringle.com was bought up by a domain squatter who puts up standard pages filled with sponsored links. I have seen too many good domains be wasted like this, so yesterday I began to think of a solution. If the government would get involved and make this a law (I know, big stretch), then the Web will be a better place consisting of useful, content-filled pages, rather than pages of only advertisements.

Domain squatters do not want to lose money, but individuals and businesses should get a fair chance at a quality domain name. What if there was a law, that instead of just prohibiting domain squatting altogether (I believe a similar bill failed awhile back), domain squatters would be required to relinquish their ownership of that domain to any individual or business that asked for it, excluding other domain squatters of course. Domain squatters would also not be allowed to charge excessive prices for their domains (I emailed the company that squats on ringle.com, and they wanted tens of thousands of dollars for it!). They could only charge the person the price for which they registered the domain name, instead of valuing that domain higher than it really is.

I’ll state the reason I believe this should be a law once again. Everyone should have a fair shot at acquiring a quality domain name.

Speed is important to me. So important, in fact, that I do my best to optimize my programs like crazy. I’m always reading and learning new methods on how to perform some task quicker. I’ve also done my best to use these methods in WicketPixie (despite it’s bugs, heh).

Anyways, here are 5 tips I follow when writing any PHP program:

1. elseif is faster than if else and multiple if statements.
2. When you have multiple elseif statements, consider using a switch block instead.
3. echo() takes as many arguments as you want, so separate variables and text as individual parameters like so:

   1	echo "Name: ", $name, ", Date: ", $date;

4. unset() arrays and objects when you’re done using them to free up memory.
5. Before you create an object, try to think about if you can make some methods static to accomplish a task.

WicketPixie 1.2 is almost ready. One change was the switch from our old AdSense system to one where you simply add the code provided by Google and select the proper placement. Before you upgrade however, you must manually delete the old wik_adsense table from your WordPress database or else you will be bombarded by fatal errors. Using software such as phpMyAdmin will allow you to do this quickly and without pain. If you don’t have phpMyAdmin, talk to your web host about alternatives. Odds are you are provided with some sort of tool to manipulate databases.

Now that is out of the way, I would like to talk about the future of WicketPixie. After numerous talks with Chris, he feels that it should be written from scratch and include plugins that handle EVERYTHING WicketPixie does now (I don’t blame him, things haven’t been working properly recently). I, on the other hand, would prefer to start from scratch and write all that stuff myself. That way, I can have more control over things and ultimately provide a better WordPress theme to you all.

Putting that aside, here’s a list of what might make it into WicketPixie 2.0 (the rewrite):

• Social Stream and more Social-based features on home page instead of latest post.
• Multiple templates, with multiple styles per those templates.
• Speed!
• More monetization capabilities (so far this means more AdSense placements).
• Other stuff I can’t think of right now.

So that’s about it for now, remember to make those database changes before you upgrade to 1.2, and cross your fingers and hope I have periods lacking homework where I can work on 2.0!

As a blogger, you need to be able to share your experiences at any moment, even on the go. I recently came across an Android application called wpToGo. If you have not already guessed, this application allows you to post to your WordPress blog from your Android phone. In fact, those first two sentences were written from wpToGo, including the link (I switched to the desktop for obvious reasons). Anyways, here are a few of the main features of wpToGo:

Multiple Accounts

Do you need to post to multiple blogs? wpToGo allows you to setup multiple accounts. All you need to know is the blog URL, your username, and your password. While I do not need this feature, personally, it is a great one to have just to say you have it.

Linking, Italicizing, Bolding, etc.

I mentioned that the link above was created from wpToGo. The application has some other text features as well, like making text bold, italic, or block-quoted. It is very simple to do with Android, just select the text you want to transform and hit the button.

Pictures!

No, the picture to the right was not added via wpToGo, but the feature is there. You can upload multiple pictures too, for those that like to express themselves visually.

Tagging and Categorizing

You are able to tag and categorize your posts just like on the desktop. However, if you have subcategories, you will not be able to tell who their parents are. Another peeve I ran into is that if you make a mistake adding categories, you must clear and start all over.

Comment Moderation

Just recently added, the comment moderation feature is a good one to have. I often get an email notification on my G1 about a new comment on one of my blog posts. I do not like loading the WordPress Admin on the tiny screen of my phone, so now I can just hop over to wpToGo and approve/unapprove any comments waiting for moderation.

You can also publish right from wpToGo, however I do not recommend it. You should always look over posts on the desktop just to make sure there aren’t any glitches and such. This application has come in handy a few times already, and no doubt I will get some sudden inspiration on the road and will make a quick draft of it using wpToGo. wpToGo is available right now for free on the Android Market.

Back in April, I explained how to use a GitHub repository with Redmine using Cron. If that seemed complicated, do not worry, there is now an easier way. I was recently asked for my opinion on a Redmine plugin called GitHub Hook.

How this plugin works is simple. After installing the plugin, just clone the GitHub repository like normal and setup Redmine to use that repository. Next, you simply create a new Post-Receive hook in your project’s Admin tab on GitHub. After that is done, you are good to go. Now every time a commit is pushed to the GitHub repository, GitHub will send a notification to Redmine and the git repository on your server will be updated.

I thought I would test this plugin with WicketPixie. I had already been using the cron approach I had described, and this plugin seemed to greatly simplify the process. First, on my server, I entered the vendor/plugins directory of my Redmine installation and cloned the GitHub Hook plugin from GitHub:

Next I followed the standard Redmine plugin installation procedures and restarted my Rails server:

Those four lines are the only commands you will need to enter into a console to setup this plugin, but I still need to clone the WicketPixie repository:

After that, I set Redmine to use that repository for the WicketPixie project:
Now all that is left to do is adding the Post-Receive URL on GitHub. GitHub has a nice guide on how to add Post-Receive URLs. The URL is <redmineurl>/github_hook. So if my Redmine site is at code.idlesoft.net, then I would enter code.idlesoft.net/github_hook as the URL.

Now you are setup, go ahead and commit to your project and make sure that the repository updated on Redmine. Thanks to Jakob Skjerning for writing this plugin and making GitHub integration with Redmine easier!

One day, I was looking for a way to speed up the page load times of my blog. I changed many things, but one of the most useful in WicketPixie’s case was moving links to JavaScript files down to the bottom of the page.

Let me first explain why moving links to scripts down to the bottom of a page speeds up the loading of that page. The HTTP/1.1 specification says that clients should limit downloading to two parallel downloads at a time per hostname. However, most browsers will stop parallel downloading if they reach a JavaScript link. So instead of loading the JavaScript file and the rest of your page, it stops to finish loading the JavaScript file first.

If the links to external JavaScript files are at the bottom of your page, HTML, CSS, images, and the page’s content will be loaded first, then each JavaScript file will be loaded one at a time. This will greatly improve page load times, because the user will first be able to see the page’s content, while the functionality the JavaScript adds is loading in the background.

One flaw is AdSense’s JavaScript that loads the ads. You must place these throughout the page, so the page loading will be blocked by those. I will see if I can post a solution to that later, in the meantime, search Google for some answers.

So, why should you go through the trouble to speed up your page loads? Well the answer is obvious: the more time a visitor waits for your page to load, the more impatient they become. So don’t lose a visitor because your JavaScript files kept your page from loading quickly.

If you are trying to make money online with advertising on your website, then you have probably heard of the term “above the fold”. Above the Fold means the content visible on a page without scrolling down much. With that definition in mind, you can already guess how that relates to AdSense ads. Placing ads above the fold can significantly increase your AdSense revenue.

I talked about how useful AdSense channels are a few months ago, but now I have proof. I setup two channels, one for ads above the fold and one for those below the fold. It was not until today that I saw the major difference between these two channels.

First off, the impressions on the ads above the fold were about 16% more than those below the fold, which does not seem like a big deal. However, once I looked at the revenue for both channels, I just had to post about it. The ads above the fold earned me 89% of my total income! To put things in perspective, let’s say you earned $500 one month. Statistics like mine would mean that $445 of that $500 was earned on ads above the fold! Of course, each ad has it’s own payout rate so that impacts things, but this still gives good reason to move more ads above the fold of your website.

So what now? Well, open up your web page in your browser and see what content in visible without scrolling. Try moving your ads around until you are satisfied, while watching your AdSense statistics.

If you haven’t noticed, I don’t have a fixed posting schedule for my blog. Many bloggers, however, strain themselves to get something out weekly or daily, or even every few hours. There are reasons to this, of course. If you post more, returning visitors will appreciate that their trip to your site will give them something new to read. So, why don’t I have a post schedule?

My philosophy is simple: If you have good content, you will get visitors. Some people believe that not pushing out new content on a regular basis would cause you to lose visitors. However, when a person needs to know something and they type their query into a search engine, they will eventually come across your site if your content is of high quality and you have what they are looking for. So, you don’t have to force yourself to write a new post daily as long as your posts are informative and helpful.

Another thing I see on some blogs is repetition. If you’re trying to write a post, don’t just look through your archives, find a good post and mix up the content a bit. If I’m a returning reader, I don’t want to read the same ideas I have before, unless of course they are part of a much bigger post.

Yesterday, while going compile-crazy and whatnot, I discovered a switch for GNU Make. The -j switch (or –jobs) allows you to have Make run multiple jobs on the same task, improving compile time. I wanted to see just how fast it was, so I did some tests.

The Tests

In these tests, I compiled Ruby’s SVN trunk, CrissCross’ git master branch, and Nginx 0.7.61. Let’s just get down to the times:
Ruby (SVN) with make:

Ruby (SVN) with make -j3:

That’s quite a big difference, roughly a 46.5% speed increase. Now for CrissCross:
CrissCross (git) with make:

CrissCross (git) with make -j3:

As you can see, CrissCross doesn’t take nearly as much time to compile as Ruby, but nevertheless, using make’s -j switch we see a performance boost of about 49.1%. For the last test, Nginx:
Nginx 0.7.61 with make:

Nginx 0.7.61 with make -j3:

Nginx takes even less time to compile than CrissCross, and using make’s -j switch you’ll get a speed boost of almost 50%!

The Graph

Had some fun with Google’s graphing abilities:

Using Make's -j switch, you can easily get performance boosts of 50%.

What’s the Point?

Okay, so what is the point of the -j switch and why is it worth using? Obviously, the performance gains shown here are a good reason alone to use it, but if you have a multi-core processor, then not using the -j switch will only make use of one of those cores. So this is where a dual-core processor comes in handy during compiling, folks.
So, you want to use the switch? Well a simple rule to follow for the number of jobs is 1 + number of cores. Because I have a dual-core processor, I use 1 + 2 cores = 3. This makes me want to get a quad-core processor even more now.

In my last post, I shared my issues with Apache ignoring the .htaccess file. The reason I was using .htaccess was to create RESTful URLs for my PHP app. I thought that now would be a good time to show how easy it is to do this.
First off, I’ll start by showing you how to rewrite URLs in Apache using mod_rewrite:

The two RewriteCond statements check to make sure that there is no filename or directory that matches a user’s request. If not, then it rewrites to the index.php page. The [L] means to stop executing rewrites at that line.
Now for Nginx and it’s Rewrite module:

Aside from the more C-style structure, the commands for Nginx and Apache are pretty similar. However Nginx makes it easier by providing the !-e operator, which checks for both files and directories. Remember, there is no .htaccess-equivalent for Nginx, the code above should be placed in the server configuration (most likely in a v-host configuration).

Now, how can I make use of a URL such as example.com/hello/world/ if they get rewritten to index.php? Well, PHP’s $_SERVER superglobal stores valuable information, like the URI typed into the browser to reach the current page. I won’t get into details on that subject, for that is not the focus of this post. Maybe some other time.

I am a web developer. As a web developer, I require a web server to test my applications on. When .htaccess does not work, I am unable to test my applications. See the problem?

So, this problem has plagued me before awhile back, and it happened again today. At first I thought it was a problem with mod_rewrite, but after a long time of scrolling through logs and config files, I found that that wasn’t the problem. The problem is due to the default virtual host config Apache provides you. If you check that file, you will notice one (or possibly more) directive called AllowOverride. What this setting does is allow files like .htaccess to modify the server configuration. By default in the virtual host file, it is set to “None”. This means that Apache will completely ignore .htaccess (or whatever file you have set to AccessFileName). Simply setting it to “All” instead will fix the problem.

While it may not be used by everyone, .htaccess still has an important role, especially if you want to prettify your URLs (WordPress uses .htaccess for this purpose). I don’t know why the Apache team decided to disable .htaccess by default, nor do I really care. I am just glad I found a solution that works.

UPDATE: So, RC1 is still a bit off (I don’t know why I said RC1, I guess I meant Beta 2). Anyways, you can download WicketPixie 1.2 Beta 2 on Ohloh. It’s very stable, as I’ve done something I haven’t with the 1.1 branch: Test, test, test.

So this blog has been pretty quiet the past few weeks, but do not worry, I am not dead yet.

I released Beta 1 of WicketPixie 1.2 over Ohloh a few days ago, and have been busy squashing bugs and adding features. Later today I hope to release RC1, which should be pretty bug-free. I will post a link to the download location on this post as well, so if you happen to read this post before that time comes, check back later.

The major changes in WicketPixie 1.2 include tons of bugfixes and performance improvements. I have totally written most of the theme and it’s features so that the code is cleaner and easier to debug and add new features to. There isn’t much to say about new features in 1.2, but I call the performance improvements the biggest feature. All the problems people have had with the 1.1 branch should be a thing of the past. Currently, I am working on adding the ability to add AdSense for Search to WicketPixie, so it will be a toggle in AdSense Settings.

I know WicketPixie 1.1 was a complete letdown, but I promise the 1.2 will change that.

I am very strict when it comes to standards compliance. I make sure that all the code and markup I write for the websites I work on comply with the standards of the Internet. So, while working on WicketPixie yesterday I checked to see if it was XHTML 1.0 and CSS 3.0 compliant.

It wasn’t.

So, I read through the list of complaints given by the validators (HTML validator and CSS validator) and got to working on the problems they found. Most of them are now fixed in version 1.1.3 of WicketPixie. Getting back on topic, one of the issues was with the Ustream and Youtube embed codes. Apparently, today’s video sites do not like to be standards compliant with the embed codes they hand out, so it is up to us (the geeky developers) to make sure it is. I Googled around and found one nifty little website that would help me “validify” all the video embed codes. That website is http://www.validifier.com.

All you do is insert in the embed code given to you by sites like YouTube, Ustream, Vimeo, and others, and it spits out some clean, XHTML-valid object code. Another reason to get excited over this is that it supports Internet Explorer! (However, it is no excuse to use it )

For you Ruby fans, they have a Validifier gem available on GitHub.

What can you learn from this? Well, now you know that if you see a <embed> tag you know it is invalid.

I have a T-Mobile G1, did I tell you? Anyways, I became interested in developing with the G1, so I am currently in the process of relearning Java (which will also come in handy Sophmore year). I was reading through the pages on Android’s Developer site when I came across a page that tells you how to debug your Android application on a physical device, rather than the emulator included in the SDK. I ran through the steps but I could not get Ubuntu to see my device. Then I figured it was some compatibility issue. After all, the latest Ubuntu version they had steps for was for Hardy. Their directions are as follows:

1. Login as root and create this file: /etc/udev/rules.d/50-
android.rules.
For Gusty/Hardy, edit the file to read:
SUBSYSTEM==”usb”, SYSFS{idVendor}==”0bb4″, MODE=”0666″
For Dapper, edit the file to read:
SUBSYSTEM==”usb_device”, SYSFS{idVendor}==”0bb4″, MODE=”0666″
2. Now execute:
chmod a+rx /etc/udev/rules.d/50-android.rules

However, in Jaunty something has changed that causes this method to no longer work. After some searching around, I put together this method:

1. Follow the above page’s directions completely.
2. Take the file you created, and add “SYMLINK+=”android_adb”" as on of the arguments. The file should now look like:

   1	SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="0bb4", SYMLINK+="android_adb", MODE="0666"

3. Instead of the filename starting with fifty, use a higher number like fifty-one:

   1	sudo mv /etc/udev/rules.d/50-android.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules

4. Restart udev (kernel event manager) by using the command:

   1	sudo /etc/init.d/udev restart

Now by running the adb tool in the SDK’s tools directory with the argument ‘devices’, you should see your Android device.

The number preceding the filename is actually the priority those rules are used by udev. The higher the number, the later it is run. Something in Jaunty was changed that caused those rules to be used too late or too early.

I performed this using my G1, so in the future if you are using a device other than the G1 or the Android Developer Phone, then you can find out the 4 character code that is used in the rules file (above it is 0bb4) by using the ‘lsusb’ command in your Ubuntu console. This will list all the USB devices currently connected to your system, including your Android device. On my Ubuntu machine, the line that refers to my phone reads:

As you can see, the four character code you need in your rules file is stated in the output (the first half of the device’s ID).

Have any problems, see an error in this post, or just want to praise me for this post? Just leave a comment!

Just yesterday I took a look at my topbar and decided that it was way too bare. I do not have any sites to link off to up there, so I thought I would fit an Adsense link unit in the topbar. It looked so nice, I decided that I must blog about it. Here I will show you how to add Adsense link units in the WicketPixie topbar.

First log in to Adsense and create the link unit, the following works best:

• A 468×15 unit with either four or five slots.
• Black background, black border, and white text.

Now, log in to WordPress and click on Editor in the Appearance drop-down. Make sure the file ‘header.php’ is writable by the web server and click on it to edit it. Once the file is loaded in the editor, find the following lines:

You may already have extra code in there, just make sure that the 468×15 unit will fit between those links and the search box. Now enter the following after the last <li></li> (Replacing _SCRIPT_CODE_ with the Javascript code Adsense provided you):

Now, my topbar section looks like this:

That’s it! Now you have a beautiful link unit in your topbar where previously it was empty real estate (assuming you did not remove anything to place the link units there, of course). It might take 10 minutes for the code to start working after you created it in Adsense.
This is worth it. I have noticed more relevant results in link units than my other ads, and now they are right up at the top of the page!

This is a guest post by Robin Vermeij.

On Idlesoft I had a problem some time ago. I wanted to integrate the forums into the theme, however this messed up the full CSS. That is why I made this script, using ruby. It places all of your styles in a group (like #forum). There are only 2 minor problems with it:

1. You will need to manually modify definitions like body after the script has ran
2. It messes up the layout of the CSS file, I advise running a beautifier to it afterward

The code:

Example:

Finally, WicketPixie 1.1.2 is done. This is what 1.1 was suppose to be, without the major bugs. You can download it on Ohloh.

Changelog:

WICKETPIXIE CHANGELOG

v1.1.2 – May 21, 2009
* ADDED: AJAX loader to keep users from looking at a half-loaded page.
* FIXED: Some bugs in the Adsense code.
* FIXED: Broken admin pages made it impossible to save any settings.

v1.1.1 – April 19, 2009
* FIXED: Temporary beautification of the theme during page loads.

v1.1 – April 18, 2009
* FEATURE: Global Announcements allow you to set a message that is displayed globally across your site.
* FEATURE: The Home Editor lets you modify important parts of your homepage without ever touching the template itself.
* FEATURE: Those nifty social buttons? Yeah, we threw those in too.
* FEATURE: The Custom Code feature allows you to add custom code to
header.php, footer.php, and after post content without modifying the template yourself.
* FEATURE: Adsense Integration allows you insert Adsense ads in the
recommended areas without touching the templates.
* PLUGIN: Numerous plugins have been added:
All-in-one SEO pack, AskApache 404, Auto-hyperlink URLs, Chitika Premium, FAlbum, Kontera, Obfuscate Email, PageNavi, and StatPress Reloaded
* PLUGIN: Updated Related Posts plugin to version 1.0.
* ADDED: WicketPixie has it’s own top-level menu in WordPress’ admin area. There is also a top-level menu for the plugins bundled with WicketPixie.
* ADDED: On the homepage and on single posts, a new ReTweet widget is shown along with the number of Tweets linking to that post and a retweet button.
* PERFORMANCE: We are using Google to serve jQuery and favicons, so page load times will have decreased.
* PERFORMANCE: Status update caching caches the latest feed item from the designated source for status updates. If the cache is older than 45 seconds, a new cache is built.
* UPDATED: Twitter post will show “from WicketPixie” now after you publish a blog post and have Twitter set to be notified by WicketPixie.
* UPDATED: @{username here} in status updates will now link to that user’s Twitter profile, if Twitter is set to provide the updates of course.
* UPDATED: Made the search highlight plugin optional.
* FIXED: Checkboxes in WicketPixie Options will remember their settings.
* FIXED: Nofollow has been added to header and navigational links for better SEO.
* FIXED: Appended UNIX timestamp to the end of CSS files to prevent caching.
* FIXED: Many other bugs

v1.0.4 – January 19, 2009 by Eddie Ringle
* FEATURE: Plain-text URLs in the Status Updates box are now hyperlinked,
now only one click is required for visitors.
* FEATURE: WicketPixie Services Notification System. Basically, when a
user publishes a blog post, Ping.fm or Twitter, depending on what the
user setup, is notified and a link to that blog post is sent out.
* FIXED: Fixed a few CSS issues

v1.0.3 – January 7, 2009 by Eddie Ringle
* FEATURE: Now only the wicketpixie folder is required, and everything
has been either automated or moved into the theme folder,
making things much easier on the user.
* ADDED: Added a footer notice in the admin area including the current
version of WicketPixie.
* PERFORMANCE: More UI improvements, now the all the admin pages WicketPixie adds load much faster and do not halt in the middle of loading.
* UPDATED: Updated SimplePie version.

v1.0.2 – January 4, 2009 by Eddie Ringle
* FEATURE: UI improvements to certain WicketPixie forms. For example,
if a source has no feed associated, it will show “N/A” on the
Sources Manager page. Also, you can’t flush non-feed streams,
so the buttons to flush them have been removed.
* UPDATED: Updated Source Manager and Faves Manager for Wordpress 2.7+
as well as leaving it backwards compatible with Wordpress 2.5+
* FIXED: Fixed the activity stream, it now shows your activity stream!

v1.0.1 – June 8, 2008
* UPDATED: Updated documentation
* FIXED: Eliminated activity.php error

v1.0 – June 7, 2008
* Initial Release

Okay, so turns out that there were more bugs in WicketPixie than I thought. The features are pretty much useless at the moment. We are working on fixing it up and rewriting some sloppy code so that this huge problem does not repeat itself in the future. Thanks for your interest in WicketPixie and we hope that these bugs do not keep you away from downloading future versions.

Ever since I had my Google Adsense account, all I did was create ads and place them on my site, that’s it. I occasionally looked at the statistics on the Adsense summary page but never realized how helpful those statistics could be.

Now I’m kicking myself.

I do not make much with Adsense at the present, but just a few days ago, I found that two clicks had been made. Finally, I became interested in discovering just what ads had been clicked, but there was really no way to do that with the summary statistics. Then, I discovered that if I visited more than just the Adsense summary page, you could create these wonderful things called channels, which help you track certain ads.

I already had two channels, one for all of the ads on my blog and another for the ads on my Feedburner feed, (which reminds me, I need to make a post relating to advertisements and Feedburner). So, I decided then and there that channels would probably help in discovering which ads are seen the most, and which are clicked on the most. Unfortunately, I have yet to receive any clicks since those last two, so I can’t track the clicks on my ads yet. However, I can see how many times each ad has been viewed, also know as ad impressions. This helps me out a lot, as now I can better place my ads to the point where they are at least being seen.

If you have read any of my other blog posts, you will know that I’m a developer for the theme I am using, WicketPixie. I added the four ad placements you see being used on this site, and now I am planning on adding more placements for those that like to experiment with their ads. So go ahead and create some channels, then decide if your current ad placements work for you.

Now, in an effort to not get off-track with this post, I’ll be ending it now. If you did notice me getting off-topic, then I apologize, my brain is _VERY_ unorganized.

What did you do for earth day? For the second half of my school day, I attend the Macomb Mathematics Science Technology Center (MMSTC for short ). Today was Earth Day, so the teachers put off their lesson plans and we celebrated. Just how did we celebrate? Due to my occasional habit of rambling on, I’ve decided to make a list to tell you:

• Picked up trash throughout the community surrounding the school.
• Ate hot dogs.
• Participated in environment-related activities like riding in an electric quadricycle, flying kites, decorating eco-friendly bags, and planting trees.
• Ate chips.
• Socialized with friends we don’t usually see during the day.
• Ate more food.

If you think picking up trash is uninteresting, then how about bringing in a 3 meter long rusted bar of metal? Other large objects were also brought in, and we left saplings on people’s doorsteps as we passed them (that’s right, today we took the role of the Tree Fairy!).

If you missed it, then get some tips on how to celebrate last-minute (if you read this later tonight) or next year by visiting www.EarthDay.net.

Are you a developer? Do you use GitHub to host your repo? Last question, do you use Redmine to manage your projects? It does not really matter if you answer those questions or not, I am going to write this how-to anyway. I needed a way to use my GitHub repo with our Redmine install at http://code.idlesoft.net/, so I started googling for answers. After finding numerous pages that just told me to quit and host a git server myself, I came up with my own solution. (AFAIK, Git server’s are a real pain if you don’t do the procedure perfectly) The answer is your friendly neighborhood Cron service. Now if you do not run Linux then sorry, I can not help you. Anyways, here’s the how-to.

First you need to clone the repo you want to link with Redmine, do this by typing the following in the linux console (I am using /var/git/repos as the parent directory for my git repos, you can choose something different):

You may have to create that parent directory first, you may also need root access depending on your server setup.

Make sure the user that Redmine runs under (usually the same as the HTTP user) has read and write permissions (I just make the web user the owner, it’s the easiest). For me, that user is www-data:

Next, you’ll need to edit the web user’s crontab, get root permissions and type the following:

You will see a text editor window open and, depending on whether the user’s crontab has been modified before, lines with cron commands. Do not worry if there is already text in there, as it is unimportant. Create a new line and type the following:

Let me explain each part of that line:

The above tells cron to perform the command every two minutes of every hour, of every day, of every month (so, every two minutes)

This is the command that cron will perform. Change into the project directory and pull the latest code from github. The “>> /dev/null” means to throw out all the output, which we don’t want to see. If you do want to see that output, change /dev/null to the path of a log like “/home/bob/git.log”.

Now in Redmine, go to your project’s settings and click on the Repository tab. Select Git from the drop-down and for the path, enter in the path to your project repo, with /.git/ appended to the end, so:
/var/git/repos/projectname/.git/

Save it, and you are done! Check out your repository on the Repository tab of your project.

One more thing, you’ll need to make sure permissions are set each time you add a new repo.

With the next official version of WicketPixie releasing soon, I thought I would give you a sneak peek at some of the new features.

I thought I would start with advertising in WicketPixie. You may have added Adsense code to the template before, but now you do not have to. WicketPixie allows you to add Adsense ads all from a web interface, letting you choose from four recommended ad placements. There is also a one-click Adsense toggle button if you do not want Adsense advertisements displaying on your blog.

Chitika is a new monetization option for you to utilize. Chitika supplies search targeted advertisements, only displaying when a visitor is directed to your site via search engine. The Chitika developers already had a WordPress plugin available, so that made it easy for us to implement it.

Finally, we have Kontera. Kontera is inline text advertising. You may have noticed the green links that are underlined twice, giving you an advertisement when you rollover them. That is Kontera in action. All you do is supply your Kontera ID and select a link color, and the WordPress plugin does the rest.

That was a sneak peek at the new advertisement options available in WicketPixie 1.1. Check back later for more information and keep an eye on the working changelog on Chris Pirillo’s site.

My lack of posting has driven me to begin this PHP tutorial series. I suppose seeing as my main focus at the present is working on WicketPixie, I should teach others PHP while the subject is sharp in my mind.
We will start with everyone’s favorite, Hello World. This post will show you basic syntax and a few of PHP’s functions. Without further ado, let’s get started.

In PHP your code starts with ‘<?php’ and ends with ‘?>’.

What’s that ‘// Code’ line? It’s a comment. Comments are useful for documenting your code as you write it. It also helps other developers get an idea of what your code is doing. Besides ‘//’ you can also surround text that you wish to comment with ‘/* text */’ This allows for multi-line comments like so:

So that was a brief run-down of commenting in PHP. Trust me, you’ll want to make use of them when you code in PHP.

Now, to output text you simple use the echo function. There are aliases for this function such as print and printf, all of which are either tweaked slightly differently or are just redirects for echo.

Notice the semi-colon (;) at the end of each line. A semi-colon tells PHP when to end a statement. Using semi-colons you can put multiple statements on a line.

Okay, so now that you know how to output text, we can write our Hello World program:

And that is it! How was that for my first PHP tutorial? We covered comments and outputting text. The next tutorial will deal with variables and numbers in PHP. Hope this helps someone. (I’m talking to you Joel! )

The troubles are finally over, because Google has implemented what looks to be their final solution to the MyBrand 404 error issue. The CNAME record you have set for your feed right now is probably something like, an obfuscated form of your email followed by the google subdomain for FeedBurner. Now, instead of your obfuscated email it is a random code. I immediately changed the record once I heard the news of the change. Here is what my CNAME record looks like now:

Simple, right? I thought so.
Stop what you are doing and right now, log in to your FeedBurner account and go to the MyBrand page to get your code and change your CNAME record. You might want to do this soon, because most likely Google will disable all of the old values.
Hopefully this trilogy will remain a trilogy, and we will not have any more issues.

As a class assignment in English we were all suppose to write a memoir about some important event in our life.  I am not one to be able to think of important events off the top of my head, so I picked the most recent event that brought me excitement.  That was joining the official development team of WicketPixie, everyones’ favorite WordPress theme.

Without further ado, here it is:

    How do you think you would react to being 14 and getting a job doing something you actually enjoy doing? Well, I think I reacted pretty darn well. When you are a geek like me, you’ll take any opportunity to work with someone that could get the word out that you exist. For me, that someone is Chris Pirillo. When my chance came, I grabbed hold of it and knew I was in for something big.
    Around June of 2008, Chris had released a free theme for people that used a blogging software called WordPress. The theme had been named WicketPixie, and it was adored by hundreds of bloggers. A long time passed, and when I started using WicketPixie for my blog, I started to ask more from it. I also discovered a few bugs and glitches. I knew the scripting language WicketPixie was written in pretty well, so I tried my hand at adding on to the theme. When everything was to my liking, I decided to send my changes in to Chris Pirillo, thinking that others may enjoy what I have done.
    A few days later when I had came home from school, I went to check my email. Chris had responded asking if I would like to join his other developer working on the project. I would have been a fool to turn something like that down. I responded and waited for more details on the project. While I waited I was a bit nervous, seeing that now I have this project on top of school and homework. I did not let that end my excitement however, and waited anxiously for the next email.
    As the excitement cooled off, I took the opportunity to just relax. After telling my parents the news, they asked me a bunch of questions which I happily answered. Afterwards I simply sat down and relaxed. The day had been a long one, and it was not even over yet. I decided from that point to get some root beer, turn on the television, and allow my heart to return to it’s regular rate.
    Throughout the whole experience I have learned that you are never too young to get a position doing something you really love. You also should not think that just because you are young it means that your talents can not be recognized and appreciated by a relatively wide audience. I was lucky to have been given this chance and because I took it, my name is out and I have one more thing to put down in my resume. I am really grateful to those who made this opportunity possible, and I am going to end this memoir now, before the writing turns into an Academy Awards script.

So I am sitting here, coding away working on an auto-updater for WicketPixie (the next release should be out soon btw) and I just can’t understand the problem I’m having. I am retrieving a file’s contents and comparing it to a variable, but for some reason it’s coming back as false when I compare it. I scratched my noggin over this for a day or so, then just dropped everything because I had to go to school (*sigh*). I don’t know what happened, but my brain was refreshed and it came to me: Files contain line terminator characters and whatnot.
So, then I just run the trim() function on the string containing the file’s contents and what do you know, it all works.
I’ve gone ahead and linked to the trim function in the PHP manual, so you can check out the examples there. Let this be a lesson to you, don’t forget about those ninja characters in files.

In my honest opinion, I believe PHP is the best language to start off with if you are just entering the developer world.  It’s easy to learn but at the same time it is very powerful. I know exactly how I learned PHP, and I believe it’s the best darn way you could possibly learn PHP.

The first thing anyone and everyone needs when developing is a language reference. Luckily, PHP has great documentation and an online function reference, so if you ever need to know how to do something, it’s all right at your fingertips. I still do not know every function available in PHP and I do not believe I ever will memorize all of them, so to this day I still refer back to the PHP web site whenever I need to know something.

Learning through example and practice is probably how I learned PHP so quickly. I remember talking with my friend over MSN when I had just met him and he had offered to teach me PHP. I didn’t think I would ever be able to learn it. All he said was to write a program that does [enter pointless function here]. He gave me no hints and no direction, other than the PHP web site. At first I didn’t have a clue how I would learn the language by doing that, but I tried anyways, and look at what that has done for me. Also, do not hesitate to do a web search on what you are trying to accomplish in PHP, for I am sure that someone somewhere has tried the same thing or at least a similar thing and will give you something to work with.

Seriously, these are not well-kept secrets at all. They just seem too obvious and people decide to run out and buy some book instead. I actually tried the book method, it didn’t work out well, I just ended up blowing some money. You have been given the best source of PHP knowledge out there, and it is free.

Want to make money online, but don’t have a blog or website to put advertisements on? Well, here’s a service that will allow you to make money online just for tweeting on Twitter!

It’s called Magpie (or Be-a-Magpie, I’m not exactly sure), and they will pay you money for allowing them to send out advertweets through your Twitter account. Now I know what you are thinking (because I thought the same thing): “So they are just going to send out spam via my Twitter account?” This isn’t true at all. Based on your tweeting habits, they will only tweet after every so many tweets of yours. Of course if you like you could set the option to send out a Magpie tweet after every tweet you make or after every 200 tweets you make. To be sure you aren’t being bamboozled, you have the option of approving each and every Magpie tweet. On top of all that, they have a button that allows you to pause the service without deleting your account and losing your earnings.

The content of the ads depend on the content of your tweets, so you won’t be seeing “Plumbing Services, Cheap!” when you tweet about fine dining. I have spoken to some people and asked them for their opinions and they replied saying they had no problems and that this was all totally legit.

But, this service isn’t just for the Twitterers. If you’d like to sign on as an advertiser, you can do that as well. Read the Magpie whitepaper for more information of advertising through Magpie.

So what are you waiting for? Be-a-Magpie

If you haven’t seen already, EdenCode is down, which means you can’t download WicketPixie 1.0.4.
Well, the good news is I am on Chris’ WicketPixie developer team and we are working on the next version of WicketPixie (much better if I do say so myself).

You can find the latest release candidate of WicketPixie on Geeks!

More info to come…

My family pays for 8Mbps down and 1Mbps. Indeed we do receive that speed, but for the same price I could be getting speeds ten times faster if I lived in Japan. The United States is lagging behind in Internet connection speeds. But it’s not just the United States, it’s the majority of the countries on Earth. We should be able to download a 2GB movie within seconds, but instead we must wait for movies to load. Web developers today are limited by only two things: Creativity and Connection speeds.

I don’t give a darn how uncreative a developer might be, but seeing as we’re in 2009 and we haven’t even gotten as far as fiber to the house yet is pretty sad. Coined by the media or not, the 3rd version of the web, Web 3.0, is approaching. We’re getting smarter each year, but our Internet speeds are getting faster every 5 years. This is a problem. Imagine the things we would be able to do with no loading times or even slight loading times for the larger web applications. I would love to have Gmail load instantly after I log in, wouldn’t you?

But seriously, with faster connections developers would be able to transfer entire databases at once instead of bits and pieces of those databases. Why am I posting this today? Well, when I visited http://speedmatters.org/ it got me thinking. We seriously are in trouble. Congress defines high speed Internet as 200-some kilobits per second (remember, there are eigth bits in one byte)! That’s not high speed, that’s a joke! What we need to do is stand up for our right to a faster Internet. And yes indeed is it a right.

So what if http://speedmatters.org/ is geared towards U.S. citizens? If the United States did something about this, I can guarantee that many other countries will follow. Even Japan’s 100Mbps connections are minor compared to the 10Gbps the spinal cord of the Internet runs on, that we know is possible.

My desk is currently in my bedroom, which is currently on the side of the house opposite the office, which contains the router, modem, and other networking equipment. My problem? We have not ran ethernet to my room yet. Sure, we have an access point up in our attic that allows the whole house to get a wireless connection, but I wanted a guaranteed connection to the Internet. Now, I’m too lazy to run the ethernet cable through the attic myself, so I did some research online. I then discovered powerline networking.

Powerline networking works by using your house’s existing electrical wiring to transfer data. All the work required from you is plugging the adapters into a wall outlet. I needed a solution quickly and ran out to buy a kit of Netgear 200Mbps adapters. They were a bit on the expensive side, but so far they have not failed me. I did a short video review on them which is up on YouTube:

If you’d like to learn more about powerline networking, visit the HomePlug Powerline Alliance website or the ever reliable Wikipedia article on powerline networking (geared to those looking for more technical terms).

Look out, Google may harm your computer.

If that heading didn’t grab your attention, I don’t know what will. When my mom decided to do a little Google searching this morning she was confronted with the warning message: “This site may harm your computer”, on EVERY SINGLE RESULT. Then, maybe I thought it was only because she was using Internet Explorer, so I tried on Chrome and Firefox, no dice. Still the warnings. Then, curious as I am, searched for Google. Even Google’s own sites have the warnings appended to them. Clicking the warning brought you to this Google help article. This is a very sad embarrassing day for Google. However, right at this second, I did another search, and the warnings were removed. How’s that for quick fixes?

If I could tell Google one thing, it would be to setup a test site, with a test search engine, and screw up on that site.

I don’t know how many people were blessed to see this hilarious screw up, but I’m just glad I shot a screenie of Google warning you that they might harm your computer.

Have a good day everyone.