Do Know Evil - Tyler Mulligan’s Tips and Tricks

My friend sent this to video to me with the message

I just sent you all a video by a group that feel strongly for net neutrality. They are kind of weird and most of their movies are based off the girls boobs so besides that what they are saying is really fucked up. The initial phase isn’t that bad but where it is headed makes me worried.

Net Neutrality

My apologies for the recent downtime, dreamhost has been having issues. All should be resolved (for now). Expect some new articles in a few weeks :D. Sorry for the delay, I’m a student!

Yesterday the much anticipated 2.4 release of Nexuiz was had. This is a great milestone for the team as it includes many new features such as better graphics, smoother game play, newer and updated maps, better weapon balancing and new game types. The game now boasts over 10 game types both official and unofficial as one of the diggers describes, Nexuiz is like “Quake 3 on crack”.

Give it a whirl, it’s free!

And if you like the game, please Digg it!

Well well well, I’ve been quite busy the past few weeks. Balancing school, work, play and of course the internet (which can fall under all three). In my business I have been maintaining websites for my clients, for myself and creating entirely new pages. Today I’d like to announce the release of the new Nexuiz Homepage, redesigned for the soon to be released version, 2.4.

The new version will be released shortly, I’ll be sure to let you all know when. Check the site for screenshots, videos and more details.

Firefox 3 Beta 3 is looking pretty nice, I decided to give it a test run because Portable Apps released it yesterday.

The UI was a little strange to me a first but it started to make more and more sense. Here’s an opening shot for first impressions.

The navigation buttons have been streamlined a bit, putting more emphasize on the back button, combining the history into one drop down and moving the Home button to the bookmarks toolbar.

One of the first things I noticed (and love) is the google suggest style address bar that queries your history based off titles and URLs.

They’ve also added a star that signifies whether you have bookmarked the page or not and it allows for a quick uninvasive way to edit your bookmark for the page.

While I find this a nice feature, I don’t believe it solves the problem of organizing your bookmarks… but rather encourages sloppiness by requiring a second click to pick a folder. I’m not sure how this will fair on the ‘mom test’.

Something I ~love~ though, is the ability to search addons without going to the mozilla site.

In conclusion, FF3 is a vast improvement that certainly increasing my web browsing efficiency. Great work guys, I look forward to the final release.

A majority of my readers use Firefox to browse the web. I myself happen to be a big fan of Firefox, as some of my previous posts have indicated. Always striving for efficiency, I have made a few tweaks to lower my frustration and increase the enjoyment of my web browsing experience. Amongst these changes, one of the first things I do on a new install is to change the way the download dialog (ctrl+j) behaves.

To clarify, I don’t like the downloads box to pop-up when I start a download and I want to choose where to save my file. To achieve this, I go to Firefox options:

and select your options as noted below:

To access the infamous download box in the future, use the ctrl+j hotkey combination:

More often than not, when I’m doing form to database interactions, I use the same field names. This means there is some redundant information in my code, making my job more difficult. As such, I’ve started to create feather.php, a SQL statement constructor class that works off data sent by the $_POST or $_GET arrays.

It’s not ready for a public release as there are still some security issues to address (see TODO) but I wanted to get some thoughts, opinions and suggestions on this.

For those of you concerned about using the same field names as database columns, I plan to add associative arrays to allow you use different names.

i.e. something like this:

$field_names array('the_first_name','the_last_name','the_zipcode');
$column_names = array('first_name','last_name','zipcode');

When I do group projects at school, I like to keep the team in check with a project management system to keep a centralized collection of work, including conversation and various files about said work. In the past I had been a big fan of the (once open-source) Base Camp clone, activeCollab. However, as many of you reading this may know, activeCollab is no longer free.

Fear not my friends! There exists a fork called Project Pier, which picks up where the the free version left off.

In my opinion, the default theme shies away from the clean cut web 2.0 freshness that was activeCollab but the folks at Project Pier were friendly enough to bundle some slick themes for those who are as nitpicky as I.

Someone had requested a script that would redirect a list of ip’s to a random list of sites.

Here’s the snippet I came up with:

<?
// list of ip's you wish to redirect
$ips = array('127.0.0.1');
// Sites you wish to redirect to
$sites = array('http://yahoo.com/','http://www.aol.com');
 
foreach($ips as $ip) {
    if ($ip==GetHostByName($REMOTE_ADDR)) {
        header('Location: ' . $sites[rand(0,count($sites))]);
    }
}
?>

I was checking out an address with a friend on Google maps yesterday and we noticed that Street View had been added to Boston.

I never really played with street view before because I wasn’t traveling to any of the supported locations, so I never really felt a connection to the information. Now that it’s in my own backyard though, I can make connections to familiar objects such as a friend’s car or even that friend (double edged sword)! The interface is very intuitive and smooth as one would expect from google. You’re given a little man that you can drag and drop. This man has a bubble that shows the picture. You can click and hold the picture to free rotate.

Google’s gotta pretty nice spread right now. They’ve undoubtedly covered some ground both literally and figuratively.

P.S. Before submitting any important form on the internet, it’s a wise idea to hit ctrl+a, then ctrl+c. That way you don’t have to write a whole post over when your browser craps out.