Client doesn’t give a crap about paying you? Give back the crap.
Personally, if I worked with gigantic amounts of poop on a daily basis, I’d probably have the same reaction, and would probably do the same thing.
Month: April 2010
Steve Job Rips Up Flash
Rarely does the Apple founder come out and write something like this, but his open letter against Flash is well worth a read, and he makes a lot of valid points. I’d like to see Adobe’s response to this.
Personally, I see both sides of the argument, and while I typically don’t agree much with Jobs, I kind of have to on this. Flash is a resource hog in many cases, and holes in it (along with Acrobat Reader) have been the cause of many malware infections I’ve had to deal with. I can see why Apple doesn’t want it running on their phone.
More on the Gizmodo Stolen iPhone Police Raid
- Editors from LA Times, Salon, CrunchGear, Hot Air, and Mediaite weigh in on whether Gizmodo editor should be considered a “journalist”.
- One expert says that and invalid warrant was used in the raid.
- cnet posted a new story to follow up yesterday’s piece about this interesting mess.
Facebook Like Buttons with Dynamic URLs in PHP and JavaScript
Facebook Like buttons are popping up all over the Web as a way for people to integrate a little bit of Facebook into their site. I thought it’d be a fun experiment to try on my site here, but I wanted a dynamic URL to pass. There are a ton of blogs out there for putting a Facebook “Like” button your pages using a dynamic URL with a bit of PHP trickery. Here’s the code I ended up using for this site:
<iframe src="https://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=<?php echo 'http://'.$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];?>&layout=button_count&show_faces=false&width=80&action=like&font=verdana&colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:80px; height:22px" allowTransparency="true"></iframe>
However, on another site I’m working on getting this implemented on, I don’t have access to the raw code, and can’t use server-side scripting or variables. So I came up with a JavaScript solution that I’m sharing here as I couldn’t find an equivalent version online:
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
document.write("<iframe src=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/plugins\/like.php?href="+document.URL+"&layout=button_count&show_faces=false&width=80&action=like&font=verdana&colorscheme=light\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" style=\"border:none; overflow:hidden; width:80px; height:22px\" allowTransparency=\"true\"><\/iframe>");
</SCRIPT>
It’s probably not the cleanest/best code in the world (I would never consider myself a programmer) and there are probably 100 different ways of doing this, but this worked for me and hopefully that will help somebody out there on the InterWebs (and feel free to “Like” this post — the button’s on the permalinked URL — just to see if it works). You also might want to adjust the width of the frame and the code a bit. I personally just wanted a small button with just the number of likes (and am considering even getting rid of that, tightening it up a bit).
And for my future reference, these two tools were very useful in doing this — escaping the code for posting here, and creating that document.write statement.
Note: I’m now using the add-this.com service for this, as it provides me better tracking and features than my code above does, but I’m leaving this here for reference.
Reading Material
- That iPhone that Giz had? And that Dilbert is parodying? Looks like it caused police to seize Jason Chen’s computers.
- Like I mentioned, the Hiter Downfall videos were all taken down. Hitler is upset.
- Patrick Stewart needs to make his dream movie (and I need to get Extras on Netflix).
- How to turn your Android phone into a killer MP3 player.
- Speaking of Android and iPhones, install Android on your 2G iPhone.
- What if I bought Apple stock instead of that Apple product?
- How to successfully educate your clients on Web development.
- The pros/cons of recent Facebook announcements.
- 8 Things I wish Everyone Knew About Email.
- Want to build a online poker-playing software robot? Here’s some source code.
Time Killer For The Evening
While this game is just a simple (but nice looking) mini-golf game, it’s intriguing because of the way they monetize it — by branding the holes.
(And apparently, looking a bit more, the initial sponsors are decided on by who sends them the most new visitors, so click away, folks.)
Reading Material
- You know that volcano that blew ash all over Europe and wrecked havoc all over the place? You can blame the guys at Top Gear for that. (By the way: If you’ve never seen Top Gear, it’s hilarious. Watch some.)
- The iPhone can now run Android.
- Protection from double jeopardy doesn’t exist if the federal government tries you.
- Chatroulette: Batman vs. Random Couple (watch it at full screen so you can read the text).
- High-tech underwear for adventurous geeks.
- Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Liberal, Maren Tarro’s account of the D.C. Tax Day tea party protest with her rightwing dad.
- Mensa Selects Its Favorite Brainy Games of 2010.
- WhiteHouse.gov releases Open Source Code, as does the Bank of Canada.
- Yet another reason to avoid McAfee software: a patch they put out borked thousands of Windows PCs.
- Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad caused quite a stir when he (basically) said that women showing any skin increases the earthquakes in the world. So to see if he’s right, some folks are organizing a Boobquake to see if they can cause the Earth to move by showing more skin. This may be one of those cases where a POIDH is called for.
- Need some background textures for your web site? Here are some great sources.
Hitler “Downfall Meme” gets taken down
The oh-so-awesome DMCA strikes again.
Adobe Gives up on Apple, Welcomes Android
Adobe says farewell to the iPhone. Yet another reason that my next phone will not be an iPhone, or a Windows Mobile phone (though I like the latter far better than the former) but an Android phone — ideally this one, but I can only imagine how much that’s going to cost.
Reading Material
- 11 Brilliant Arrested Development Shout Outs To Its Actors’ Past Roles. For example, I had no idea that was Buster in that VW Mr. Roboto commercial, and they made reference to it. I have the whole series on DVD, need to finish watching them all.
- Tweets may be 140 characters (at the most) but there is a lot of data behind them.
- Photoshop CS5 looks pretty sweet — too bad I just got CS4.
- Australia is pissed, and I can’t say I blame them.
- There have been some really amazing pictures that have some from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano eruption, but I honestly believe this is probably the best (more from the photog).
- Infographics seem to be all the rage lately — and most of them are just useless.
- The best performing media player for 2010.
- Expect this to be implemented sometime on here, since I always seem to miss something: Crowd-sourced copy-editing.
- Interesting selections/reviews on remote access software. I’m in the process of (finally) upgrading from a Citrix terminal network to full-blown computers at the office, but will still occassionally need to get access to desktops at the office.
- Top 10 Free Antivirus software of the year.
- jQuery is going to get implemented on some site I manage someday. There are just all sorts of sexy plugins and useful bits of code that I just don’t know how I could go without when I finally redesign this site or Bend Blogs.
- Since nobody here seems to ever go to my band concerts, you can get on YouTube and watch some of them.
- Collection of local Web cams.
- Olivia Munn Pranks Lovelorn Asylum Intern.
- Have a PalmPre? Tether it.