Think about it, there where 1.7 Million sales within 3 days of the launch. 1.7 Million. Think about it for a minute … Yeah, that’s a lot of devices. Of course there are going to be problems with anything new, especially electronic devices, and the people you are going to hear from most are the ones that have problems. What people fail to realize are there are many many many more people, such as my wife and myself, who have Zero (0, nill, none, nada, no) problems what-so-ever with their phone. We have no new software problems, no hardware problems. And neither of us are affected by the antenna issue.

I think some , if not most of it, are bloggers trying to ‘ride the wave’. They are playing on the ‘fears’ of consumers to drive people to their blog’s and follow them on twitter. WAKE UP. Follow someone who can write something relevant and original. I’m not saying I’m that person, I’m far from it. But stop spreading the FUD.

The iPhone4, in my eyes, is revolutionary. The build quality of the phone is outstanding. It feels solid when holding it. Performance is amazing, both with software and web access. And, most importantly, it works as a phone. If you haven’t seen the display on this thing, you are doing yourself a dis-service. The ‘retina’ display is simply amazing. Apple wasn’t first to market with a 320 pixel-per-inch display. But they where the first to put it in a quality phone, with a quality os, and market the hell out of it.

Stop crying, stop complaining. The iPhone 4 wasn’t a failure, it isn’t going to cripple Apple, and it wasn’t a bundle of mistakes.

I went through and purchase screen, then the server stopped, upgraded and restarted. In less then 3 minutes I had my VPS back up, now with two nodes worth of resources. While this really isn’t anything too earth shattering, it sure is nice when things “Just Work”. Too often people don’t mention when this happens, but was happy things worked as expected.

In three days the server will go through and upgrade it’s storage, so that wil be another test, but I am sure it will work without any problems (though I am using their snapshot backups just in case)

I’ve been able to create a custom page for putting in management bio’s for a small site I’m building. Using the feature image and a custom meta box for the title and name, I’ve got a fully customizable page for just the attorney’s. You can take this a few steps further by defining out a custom page to display those pages by themselves and then I also created a template page that will format and display the listing of them they way I want. Pulling out the feature image, their name and title.

Another great use of this is for callouts. On the current project I am working on, we are listing out 3 callouts on the main page. In the past I’ve seen this pull in content from articles, or hard-coded into the template. I’ve now been able, to use the register post type to be able to create callouts. It will grab the first three and throw them into the div’s I have defined in the template. Using the feature Image and a meta box field for the link I can now put in text or an image for the callouts and have it link to any page in the CMS.

I look forward to exploring WordPress as time goes, I think it might finally become the standard CMS for small sites.

Since then there have been several different spin offs and IMHO, better ones out there. For the last several years I’ve been running DD-WRT on my Linksys WRT54G (The same one that I originally put OpenWRT on, fried, and then fixed). I found myself need to extend my wireless network, but not in the normal since of wireless. I need to turn a switch into a wireless client so I could have a hard wired connection on the other end.

I started searching for a new router, one that would last me a while, and more importantly. One I could hack. The short of a very long process for me, I settled on a ASUS RT-N16. This thing is loaded, 32MB of storage, 128MB of ram, and480 Mhz processor. It supports B, G and N. Pretty nifty. I got it, fired it up. And spent just enough time in the Asus firmware to load up DD-WRT.

I took my old Linksys and converted it into a wireless client. So no, it is just one huge switch. What I have is the wireless portion of it is just like the wireless in a laptop, and it connects to my router. Then all the ports on the back are just like a normal switch. I can now plug my desktop computers in my office up to it, and they are all on my network. It’s a pretty slick setup.

The connection between the Linksys router (now switch) and the Asus router is a bit flaky at times. And this is because of a multitude of reasons. The biggest being the number of walls the signal has to travel through. But I am working on fixing that one (moving the Asus router out of the bedroom one day). The other problem is the DD-WRT firmware on the Asus router. The router requires a beta release of DD-WRT running the 2.6 kernel. Older versions used the 2.4 kernel. But to support a wider ranger or routers (including this Asus) they had to use the 2.6 Kernel. There are still some bugs, and some things are quite working like they are suppose to, but that is why it is a beta release.

Overall, I am very happy with everything. As long as I can resist the temptation of tinkering with them. The connection remains really stable.

This one is much brighter and welcoming then the other one. Which was had a grunge look and feel to it, with muted colors.

This one was provided by Woo Themes

First, Pin Tabs, while this isn’t anything new, a switch allows you to pin the first number of x tabs. This is beneifical. I have my blog, e-mail’s and Google Reader open in tabs and use this to make them all pinned on startup

--pinned-tab-count=5

Now this next one is for a specific extension SpeedTracer, a lot like yslow for firebug. Well, to make this one work you need

--enable-extension-timeline-api

So that’s it, nothing ground shattering. But definitely useful.

If you are a geek, and you haven’t spent the time to check this out yet. I highly suggest you do. And I don’t mean just using it for answers (because it is great for that). Go through and see if you can help out with any. The first few responses I was a bit nervous about. But once you get past it, it isn’t too bad.

MySQL allows you set to set the character-set and collation to utf-8. To my understanding this will allow you to store UTF-8 data in your database. This makes it really nice when you have users copying and pasting data into your CMS. It will store the special double-quotes, trademark symbols, and pretty much anything else you can throw at it. No big deal to backup up, right? Well I did an export within PHPMyAdmin and using the mysqldump utility. Neither one worked, and I was pissed. And actually so was the client because I didn’t catch it before we launched the site. So last night I was frantically searching Google as fast as I could (notice I wasn’t searching the web, I was searching Google – that should make an interesting blog post for another time). And I eventually found my answer. It had to do with the mediums inbetween the export and import to support utf-8 characters – Great.

So without having to use a 3rd party app, or write some code, I was able to figure out how to do it with myqldump. Instead of using the greater than symbol to redirect the output into a file, mysqldump has a switch -r to use to redirect output into a file. They say to use it on Windows machines, so I kind of felt dirty for using in the linux command line :/ But I did, and guess what, an import using virtualmin on the production server and everything worked, the data came across cleanly.

From the brief reading that I did, using the power of output redirection at the unix command line can break UTF-8 encoding. I guess it kind of makes sense if the server or terminal you are using doesn’t support it. But it isn’t something I would really think about.

Just for those wondering what I ended up doing. I normally do a mysqldump like

mysqldump -u user_name -p database_name > mydump.sql

This time around, i just had to change it to

mysqldump -u user_name -p database_name -r mydump.sql

So simple I could throw up.

I have seen the postings on Delicious Bookmarklets before, but I thought they where cheesy and not really want I wanted. Well I finally broke down and read about them while I was waiting on a call from a client. And low and behold, they are actually pretty nice. I now have two links for Delicious in my bookmark bar. One is to add a tag to delicious and the other is to view my Home, which is a feed of your links.

The only thing it is truly missing is a way to pull in your bookmarks. But I think this is a good thing. It will keep me from using Delicious as my internal bookmark tool, it will move it more towards what it is, and a socializing bookmark tool. Links that are specific to this machine I’m on, or links that aren’t important for me to remember elsewhere will go there. They will be true bookmarks, while my Delicious links are will become more of a socializing way to share links with friends and family. Things I will want to pull up elsewhere, not my payroll company or a link to the google chrome release blog

Just thought I would give my two cents on the matter and an initial endorsement on the whole Bookmarklets thing.

I don’t know if I had a favorite talk. The XDebug was pretty informative as I have never used it before, and always wanted that level of debugging. The PECL talk was also very interesting, it was a lot less formal then the others. It was part open forum , part talking about some of the lesser known extensions under PECL. I am glad I attended this one as it really pointed out some cool extensions that could really save some time developing. I also really want to check out the cario one as it looks like you could make some really nice charts and graphs with this. Also the Design Patterns talk was interesting. I knew of Design Patterns, but never really saw the use to take the time to learn about them. Well, after attending the talk, I am going to force myself to read more about them now. The speaker,  Cal Evans, suggested the book, and it sounds like the de facto standard, Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.

The lunch was great, provided by the Dolce. Afterwards Microsoft provided an open bar with some hot hors d’œuvre. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity and had an ice cold Shiner Bock and some chicken on a stick. It was a great way to end the day.