The Daily WTF is a great source for humorous (and sometimes unbelievable) technical blunders. About six years ago (before PEAR and such), I wrote a simple OO wrapper around PHP’s mail() function. I haven’t really touched the code, but I did slap a CC license on it last year. Today, I got this email: From: …
Category Archives: tech
Sending email from cell phones
With my old Nokia 6340i, sending email was as easy as sending a text message — you selected Messages > Write e-mail in the menu, entered the email address, subject, text, and off it went. When I got my 6620, I was disappointed to find out that feature had been removed. Sending an email now …
pave save the internet
MoveOn is organizing a net neutrality awareness campaign. Sign the petition to the US Congress asking for meaningful and enforceable network neutrality: I signed this petition, along with 250,000 others so far. This petiton will be delivered to Congress before the House of Representatives votes next week. When you sign, you’ll be kept informed of …
Using CURL in PHP
In Python, to read a URL, I do the following: import urllib data = urllib.urlopen(‘http://foo.com/’).read() PHP links against cURL, which lets you accomplish the same thing … in five lines of code. If this is something you plan to do more than, say, once, you’ll want an easier way of doing this. Here’s the function …
the importance of net neutrality
the execs at the telcos (perhaps the same people whose secretaries print their emails — who knows) have this great idea to make money off the internet: meter everything. their argument is that google is getting a “free ride” on their network. well, no, they aren’t. they are paying for bandwidth at their end, and …
technical confidence
Sally Carson, a designer I met at SXSW, put together a thoughtful examination of what happens when people are intimidated by technology: I think that instilling confidence into our audience — whether on the web or on an electronic device — is an important component of good interface design. Something about Phil’s phone intimidates him, …
free music from verve
I found a card at SXSW for a free music sampler from Verve. They want you to go to verveforecast.com/sxsw, then register, thenenter in the “download code” of vforecastsxsw. The music sampler (Jamie Cullum, Brazilian Girls, Jackie Greene, Rhett Miller, Susan Tedeschi, Teddy Thompson) comes in four formats, all of which are annoying: WMA, zip …
Windows 2006 = Mac OS 2003?
Re-Introducing the Real Windows Vista.
waterfall 2006
interesting software conference this spring. Sessions include: Take Control of Your Team’s Decisions NOW! by Ken Schwaber Avoiding the Seven Pitfalls of Lean by Mary Poppendieck Pair Managing: Two Managers per Programmer by Jim Highsmith Two-Phase Waterfall: Implementation Considered Harmful by Robert C. Martin User Interaction: It Was Hard to Build, It Should Be Hard …
OK Go says “OK stop DRM”
Boing Boing points us at a New York Times piece and blog entry from OK Go’s Damian Kulash on the futility of DRM: From the blog: DRM just flat out sucks. Its most obvious problem is that it doesn’t work. No matter how sophisticated the particular software, it only takes one person to break it, …