unethical blogger

I often get these contact form submissions on joeaudette.com and on mojoportal.com where people are pitching to get my site to the top of google, no big deal, I delete them, but yesterday was the first time I got one by phone.

Yesterday at about 2PM I got a phone call on my cell phone from 951-813-2184 that went like this:

1. me: hello?
2. caller: is this the tree service?
3. me: i think you have the wrong number
4. caller: are you Source Tree Solutions?
5. me: that is my company but it is a software company not a tree service
6. caller: oh, well you're listed in the yellow pages under tree service
7. me: that's news to me, I didn't know I had a listing in the yellow pages
8. caller: well are you interested in getting your site to the top of google?
9. me: oh my God, you gotta be kidding me
10. caller: well what do you do for advertising
11. me: Dude! you don't know the first thing about me, my business or my web site, I don't need your SEO spam phone calls, please never call this number again, click

I chuckled for about 15 minutes after that, but hope it is not the start of a trend of spammy phone calls.

Joe Audette  ...

Recently I've begun using the jQueryUI tabs in mojoPortal as an alternative to YUI tabs. I still like the YUI tabs but there is only 1 skin available currently for YUI tabs, whereas there are a 18 themes for the jQuery UI tabs, so its likely that at least one of them will look good with a particular mojoPortal skin. This has got me thinking about switching to use the jQuery tabs in many or most places where we use YUI tabs. I still need to test a few things like making sure I can use FCKeditor inside the tabs like I can with the YUI tabs. One thing I like about the YUI tabs is that they automatically adjust to right to left layout if they are contained within and element with direction:rtl in the css.

I was worried at first whether the jQuery Tabs would support right to left layout because when I googled for it I could not find any explnations how to make the tabs layout from right to left. I found a number of people asking about it on mailing lists and forums but no-one offering any answers. So I used Firebug to study the css classes assigned to the elements and figured out the things that need to be overridden to make it layout from right to left. I thought I should post it since clearly there are people looking for hep with this. Its actually very straightforward, you include the normal css for the jquery ui theme, and you add another css file below it in the page (it must be lower in the page in order to override the style settings above it in the jquery ui css). There is only a little css needed because we want to override the minimum possible style settings, this is what is needed:

.ui-tabs { direction: rtl; }
.ui-tabs .ui-tabs-nav li.ui-tabs-selected,
.ui-tabs .ui-tabs-nav li.ui-state-default {float: right; }
.ui-tabs .ui-tabs-nav li a { float: right; }

I tested it with all 18 jQuery UI themes and it worked great. I hope this is helpful to others.

 

Joe Audette  ...

These are all the cell phones I've ever had.

I remember when I first got that Samsung clamshell phone on the left, gosh, how long ago was that 1997, 98 99? Somewhere in there I'm sure. I remember being so excited about that phone when I first got it. As a kid I had always fantasized about those communicators they used on Star Trek and when I got this phone it was like the realisation of a childhood dream. I got rid of my land line pretty soon after that and haven't had one since.

I was pretty excited when PocketPC phones first came out. Being a Web Developer, the idea of always having access to the internet wherever my phone worked seemd like a dream. I think I got that phone around 2002 or 2003 and at the time I gave my old phone to my younger brother Frank who lived in North Carolina (I was living in TN at the time). It really wasn't a compelling internet experience, and though I kept it until long after my service contract expired, I got really tired of carrying around that big phone. I mean if you put it in your pocket people were like "hey is that the internet in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?". It was really a phone that needed a belt clip like Batman, but I really wasn't into that belt clip thing.

So then I got the Razr, must have been around 2004 or 2005, again I gave my old PocketPC phone to my younger brother Frank. I was much happier with the Razr, it was slick, it was small, and it was a joy to stop carrying that old boat anchor PocketPC.

Last month I got an iPhone. Its way beyond any phone I ever imagined seeing in my lifetime. Its got a compelling web surfing experience, and yet it fits nicely in your pocket without raising eyebrows. I know a lot of people like a physical keyboard and those folks tend to like Blackberries. I suppose if I was answering a lot of email with my phone I might wish for a real keyboard too. Honestly I haven't yet answered an email with my iPhone. For me its more about knowing whether I have important mail at any time than actually responding to it from my phone. It can usually wait until I'm near a computer again. After all, I'm near a computer about 95% of the time. For me its just another convenient way to service my internet addiction. I work long days and then finally collapse and watch movies at the end of the day when I can no longer keep going. I used to find myself getting up from the couch a lot just to check if any new mail had come in, or see how many people are on mojoPortal.com. Now I don't have to get up off the couch. In some ways I like the Facebook experience better on the iPhone than on a computer. I love having a lot of my music collection in my phone, love the GPS. Its a really great device.

So I thought again whether I should offer my old Razr to my younger brother Frank. The funny thing is, now that I'm living in North Carolina, I find out he never activated or used any of the phones I ever gave him, thats how I'm now able to take a picture of them all together. He hasn't committed to a new phone contract for like eight years now. He's still using this old monstrosity:

We're talking dinosaur phone. Not only that but he relies on this thing for all his communication and he lost the battery charger years ago, so he can only charge it now in his car and he's been doing this for years. I'd say he's way over due for a new phone.

Joe Audette  ...

I walk by this sign almost every day when I go for my exercise walks at the park, its always struck me as funny. Today I took this picture with my iPhone.

Joe Audette  ...

agentdero: @atl game mechanics, synergy, tablet.

agentdero: It's funny reading the Hudson lists now that everybody is on @JenkinsCI, I think Jason van Zyl is fulfilling his dream of being @kohsukekawa

The document switcher is a quick way to switch focus between open documents and pads using the keyboard. It's activated by the Ctrl-tab or Ctrl-shift-tab combinations, and remains open as long as Control remains held down. While it's open, you can change the selection — up arrow or shift-tab moves the selection up, down arrow or tab moves the selection down, and the left and right arrows move the selection between the pads and documents lists. When you have selected the item you want, release Control, and it will be selected.

The documents list is sorted by which have been most recently used, and when the dialog is opened, the first document it selects is the item after the current active document, i.e. the document that was focussed before it, since it's assumed that you don't want to switch to the current document. However, this also make it very easy to switch between a few documents with minimal keystrokes.

We are so happy to announce that Unity 3.2 is now live and available to download! Here is a rundown of the major new features and improvements: Image Effects: New Depth of Field with fantastic bokeh, improved bloom and several other image effect tweaks and fixes. New Water: All new Water prefab in standard assets that includes waves, [...]

agentdero: @phildrone I wouldn't say mutually exclusive, you just have to decide to suck at one or the other ;)

agentdero: @phildrone I never really thought about Yahoo as a fast-paced startup ;)

agentdero: @cowboyd Stack overflow

agentdero: How to kill your free time in two easy steps: 1) Work at a fast-paced startup 2) Be married

agentdero: @sachinrekhi If you're in love with Python, every time is a good time to be a Python developer :D

agentdero: RT @RodBegbie: "Data visualization is important. I know because I searched for it on Quora and there are lots of results."

With gtk+ closing in on their 3.0 release, many folks have been inquiring about Gtk# 3 lately. We've had a number of offers to help as well. I've been tied up with another project at the ol' day job, but I've been dedicating a fair amount of evening and weekend time toward 3.0 bindings since the holidays. It also looks like I'm going to be getting some more cycles to push the effort forward in the near future.
Over the past couple evenings, I've pushed a series of commits to github.com which update master to a 2.99.x API level. Several of the samples are still not being built because of 3.0 API breakage. Most of the samples which currently build also run cleanly, but there are some crashes there to address as well.
I've temporarily created a cairo-sharp.dll from the copy of Mono.Cairo we have been carrying in the tree, with a few updates to expose some of the new 1.10 API. This will likely get merged back into the mcs/class tree, but it's a convenient place for us to move fast with fleshing out the new bits.
The generated APIs are completely unaudited at this point. The improvements in the external Gio and Builder bindings since they spun off remain unmerged. There is plenty of work to go around if people would like to jump in and help. We are going to need migration docs, new API docs, the list goes on...
Since people are likely wondering, the module still starts from a C parse. I have experimented with starting from GIR format but feel at this point, given the current tooling state, that it will be quicker to get to 3.0 using the existing GAPI parser for gtk-sharp. Since this is getting long already, I'll expand on the reasons in another blog, plus talk about the approach I think we can take to begin incorporating GIR as a starting point in new bindings.

agentdero: RT @ashlux: Interesting... the Sonatype "Hudson Survey" asks what CI server are you using but #jenkinsci is not an option. http://bit.ly ...

submitted by agentdero to aviation
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agentdero: RT @jenkinsci: We're having an IRC meeting in 20, join us! Details http://urlenco.de/wmhfd You might even win an iPad! We're not offerin ...

One of the challenges existing Mac developers face with the Mac App Store (MAS) is whatever copy protection you have been using up until now has to be thrown out in favor of a protection scheme based on Apple’s App Store “receipts,” a tiny cryptographically signed file they place inside purchased applications that let your app confirm the authenticity of an application upon launching (and at any other time).

This leads to a conundrum if you continue to sell software directly, or offer preview beta releases for direct download. How can you offer access to these releases for customers who purchased through the MAS and thus do not have the “Registration Code” that direct-purchase customers receive? Apple provides no means of determining the identities of, or contact information for, authorized MAS customers. But even though I don’t know who these customers are, I want to treat them as first-class customers in every regard.

For me, I decided that the compromise is to provide, for those MAS customers who want it, full access to the direct-download versions of my software. Today, any customer who buys a MAS edition of my applications will find that, after running that edition at least once, they are automatically authorized to run direct-download versions of the app from that time forward.

A Recipe for Mass Authorization

How did I achieve this bit of wizardry? And more importantly, how can you, or other developers whose apps you love, achieve the same thing? There are three major code-level changes that I needed to make. I’ll discuss those changes, and some of the potentially non-obvious considerations to keep in mind while making them.

 

1. The MAS edition must stash its receipt somewhere obvious for the direct-download edition to find it. Because both editions of my app share a common Application Support folder, I chose to store them here. Inside the Application Support folder, I create a subfolder called “App Store Receipts” that contains the pertinent receipt files for this app.

   Why a folder? Because a customer may sync or copy their App Support folder across various Macs, I chose to store each receipt keyed by the computer’s GUID, which is derived from its wired ethernet MAC address. Developers who have implemented app store authentication will be familiar with this value.

2. The direct-download version must, in the event it is not already authorized by a standard registration code, look for secondary validation in the form of a receipt in the aforementioned location. If it finds a receipt, the same type of validation is performed on the receipt as would be performed in the MAS edition.

   You will want to apply some lenience when interpreting the validity of the receipt. For example, you probably want a receipt authorizing version “3.0″ to also be considered valid for “3.0.1″ or “3.0.1b1″. Similarly, if you use separate bundle IDs for your MAS and direct-download editions, you will want to consider the MAS bundle ID as valid for the direct-download version.

3. If you used a different bundle ID for your MAS and direct-download editions, then for the sake of the users sanity and yours, you probably want to implement some kind of transparent migration of preferences from one edition to the other. You don’t want customers to have to go in and reset all their preferences when they switch, and it can be annoying as a developer as well.

   I had some preference migration code around from when I transitioned MarsEdit and Black Ink from their previous companies’ bundle IDs to mine. I reused that transition code, with a bit of careful but appropriate logic: if the other bundle ID was modified more recently than mine, then import it and replace my defaults. The same logic is applied in each edition so that whatever version you run, you’ll feel as though you’ve picked up all the latest preferences from the last time you used the app.

 

With these changes in place, I have the flexibility to offer direct-download versions of my software to any MAS customer who asks for it, or for customers who I request the assistance of in testing a pre-release bug fix. In most cases, I can just ask the customer to run the app. In the worst-case scenario, when a receipt has not yet been “stashed,” I have only to ask the customer to run the MAS edition once before trying the newer release.

Pitfalls and Downsides

This solution isn’t perfect. In particular, it brings MAS customers into the fold for direct-download software, but does nothing to soothe the existing and new direct-purchase customers who wish for access to the benefits of the MAS: sharing reviews, mass-updating purchased software, etc.

Worse, it leads to a potentially confusing situation where a customer may be running version 3.0 of an application that they direct-downloaded before Apple had approved it. When Apple does approve it and it goes live on the MAS, they are notified inside the App Store about the available update, but when it does update, it will update the previously installed MAS version, and not the direct-downloaded one. To benefit from the Red Sweater compromise, customers need to embrace the mental model that MAS and direct-download versions of the application are fundamentally different, and need to be managed and stored separately from one another.

I believe that the people this compromise serves are in general a more technically astute type of customer who will be able to embrace this difference, or will understand it with little explanation on my part. The less technical customers are not liable to be on the lookout for beta releases or “day of” releases of new software, and will happily wait until the MAS notifies them of a standard, Apple reviewed update.

 

agentdero: @rabois So you can bill people for your answers?