I bought an HP C6380 all-in-one printer the other day and just noticed something weird. The time it takes before it starts printing is exponential to the number of copies I want to make. How stupid is that? If I want to print the same page 20 times it shouldn’t have to take 20 times longer for it to figure out what to do before printing, should it? Just calculate everything once and use the same calculation 20 times. There is obsiously something I don’t know about writing printer drivers, or the drivers are just bad. Scary.
I get tons of spam comments on this blog. I think it’s a common problem rather than it is because this blog is so popular(it isn’t). One of the tools for dealing with spam here is Akismet, the other one is me.
Read Post ›
The other day I decided to do some maintenance on this site. The first thing I did was to do a backup of all files, by downloading via FTP. Then I did some changes locally, deleted this blog on the server, and uploaded it again. Since I hadn’t changed anything that could possibly go wrong I didn’t test the site afterwords, I just check that it was there on devcase.com and it was. Big mistake. In fact, it was only the fist page that was good, no other pages worked and I didn’t notice until today, a few days later.
What had happened was that the FTP program ignored hidden files, which includes the essential .htaccess which meant that the Apache web server didn’t know how to serve my permalinks. It was my fault obviously, not a fault of the FTP program. It as a background task while doing other things but I should have been more careful and pay more attention to what I was doing. Oh well, it won’t happen again.
I really like ScribeFire. It’s a blog authoring tool in form of a Firefox extension. The features I like most are:
- There’s no need to log on to the admin interface in WordPress or whatever blog software is used. Multiple blogs are supported.
- Posts can be authored and saved offline to be submitted later
- In split screen mode, it’s possible to write a post at the same time as browsing the web.
Do you use ScribeFire?
If you’ve ever moved abroad or to a city you don’t know much about, you know how difficult it is to find a flat in advance. If you haven’t, well you can imagine. The problems are - you don’t know what the areas are like, it’s difficult to compare prices and looking at a list of available properties doesn’t give an overview of where they are located. If it is in another country with another language it makes it even more difficult.
Cristian Suazo, a dear friend of mine, has been working on homein.com, a property rental and property sales site for quite some time which aims to solve these problems. I have known about it for quite some time but the other day I stumbled upon a Spanish article about it that made me have another look. It really is a brilliant service!
The unique feature is that all properties are marked on a map, so you can immediately see where it is located. Each property marker has a colour representing a price level, hovering the mouse pointer over a marker shows the price. You can set a filter so that only flats within your budget are displayed.
At the moment the serivice is only available for a handful cities in Spain, namely - Barcelona, Madrid, Mallorca, Marbella, Costa Brava, Sant Cugat and Sant Just. I hope they roll this out for other locations around the world. If this had been available for the cities I’ve moved to and within, it would have saved me a lot of time and money!
I just have to write this post right this now, it can’t wait because tomorrow it won’t feel like does now. You’ll know what I mean in just a few seconds, read on.
Read Post ›
I have a list of domains that are up for renewal. Most of them I haven’t used for anything, they’ve been parked since I bought them and are only costing me money. They are not very generic but good for what I bought them for, it’s just that I’ve never come round to implement the sites that I had planned to. I’ve learned this now, if I come up with an idea I no longer start the project by buying a suitable domain. The thing is, if the site is good and useful, the domain name isn’t really that important, people will find and use it anyway. I also don’t need a separate domain for each project. I will only keep the very good ones and make use of them, anything else is stupid.
Yes, I’ve done it. I bought a Mac. A Mac Mini to be precise. I have thought about buying one for quite a while, more than a year. The reasons for buying one before were that they are small, quiet and Unix compliant but now I also realized I want to develop applications for IPhone and for doing that I need two things: Read Post ›
I am working on a PHP thing where I need to be able to move array elements around based on their keys, the ordering is important. Non of the built in functions seem to do what I want and I could not find any similar problem/solution already posted somewhere so I made my own. In case someone needs the same thing, here it is, I place it in the public domain so feel free to use it as you want.
Read Post ›
