derek derek derek

My observation for today: If you have to keep reminding people, you probably aren’t.

iPhone Field Test Diagnostics - Secret menu on your iPhone to give you information about your current network, signal to noise ratio, etc. Just dial *3001#12345#*

The technical and security limitations are certainly well understood here, so Apple can’t be blamed, but it is annoying to have a household with two iPhones, an iMac, and a MacBook, coupled with a desire for separate user accounts for family members, but with a single iTunes library.

Sharing the music between Macs works great with zero config.  Sharing the library between two user accounts on a single machine works fine if you select a shared location for the library.  Using two iPhones syncing different material on a single machine works great with zero config.  But any combination of the above, and things get hairy, very quickly.  If I come up with some clever solution, I’ll be sure to share it.  Surely my situation is not so unique.  There must be many such Apple Households where each family member has no desire to share each others’ desktop, documents, contacts, calendars, and email, but wants to share music and iPhone Apps.

Derek Allard Comments on PHP 4 Support in CodeIgniter - "its gone from interesting, to funny, to boring, and now its back to funny again"

In case you didn’t know, iTunes has an equalizer, and it’s extremely helpful.  You can turn it on and change its settings by opening the Equalizer palette window from your iTunes Window menu, or by pressing opt+cmd+2 (alt+ctrl+2 for Windows).  If you’re on a laptop, you can use it to get the most out of your tiny tinny speakers by using the "Small Speakers" EQ setting, or the Vocal Booster if you’re watching a tv show or movie.  I use "Spoken Word" quite often both on the laptop and on my nicer external speakers attached to my iMac when I listen to podcasts.  Following that, "Rock" and "Electronic" get the most usage, and to my ears it shapes the sound in a noticeably pleasant way.

And I don’t know how I always forget about this, but you can set Equalizer Presets on a per-song basis.  Just Get Info, cmd+I (ctrl+I for Windows, or right click > Get Info on either platform), go to the Options tab and select the EQ preset.  No more fiddling with it in between songs.  Even better, select an entire group of songs or album, Get Info, and set them all at once.  The EQ will then automatically shift to that setting whenever iTunes plays that track.

SmugShot - I <3 SmugMug

There’s an opening on our development team for a new Technology Architect:

The Technology Architect will have responsibilities covering many aspects of software development, from maintaining the current code base for ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter to developing new tools and applications under the direction of the CTO. The Technology Architect will also be required to help keep documentation for products up to date.

The Technology Architect is a full-time position (part-time is also available).

I’ve not used www in my sites’ URLs for at least two years, as it’s a subdomain that isn’t needed, and is downright goofy to say, type, and use.  And don’t even get me started on what a retarded acronym it is.  World Wide Web?  Sure perhaps in the late 80’s early 90’s when a network administrator wanted to make it clear that their servers ran a web server in addition to FTP or other services, but now?  ggg: Goofy goofy goofy.  I think I prefer the Chinese direct translation: Ten-thousand Dimensional Net.

So when I stumbled across no-www.org today, I felt compelled to validate and register my site with them, and since accessing my site with www. still works, you just get redirected to my domain sans the goofiness, I am at a Class B compliance level, and is now reflected in my side bar.  If you want to join in and aren’t yet compliant, here’s the .htaccess I’ve been using.

 
# forcably remove www
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.derekderekderek\.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://derekderekderek.com/$1 [L,R=Permanent]
 

Magical Scanning Software - VueScan - I've had problems getting a working scanner driver since updating to Leopard and Photoshop CS3. Canon doesn't keep their driver for my scanner up to date. Zero config, VueScan automagically worked. Awesome.