The Latest Stuffs

I built a bridge once

Two nights ago I watched Margin Call, a film loosely based on the financial collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. To me, the most gripping part of the entire film was when Will Emerson (Paul Bettany) and Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci) are sitting on the steps outside Dale’s house. Part of their conversation goes like [...]

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Translation from PR-speak to English, in the style of John Gruber, of the text regarding Kindle’s that can be found on Amazon’s current home page.

Amazon says: There are two types of companies: those that work hard to charge customers more, and those that work hard to charge customers less. Both approaches can work. We are firmly in the second camp. Translation: Screw you, Apple.

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I tried to be a Virgin Mobile customer for 5 hours

I bought Carly an iPad 2 for her birthday. While she’s out delivering the best macarons I’ve ever eaten, sometimes she really needs to send an email, find a phone number, tweet something or look up a map to somewhere. I thought the larger form factor would be perfect for her, and the data plans [...]

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Set the contents of an iframe using jQuery

I needed to do some magical AJAXy previewing (inline) for an email templating system I’m building that generates both text and HTML versions of an email. For displaying the HTML version of the email inline I was using an iFrame. Using jQuery to do an AJAX post of the template, I then needed to render [...]

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EasyCal: Online Booking for Busy, Independent Professionals

Kareem and I have been working on making EasyCal the best online booking software for busy, independent professionals for about 1.5 years now. It’s been a bit of a marketing challenge because EasyCal is well suited to many different professionals. Basically, if you work independently and you want to save time by taking bookings online, [...]

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Fix jQuery Datepicker in Colorbox

I couldn’t get a jQuery datepicker to bind to an element that was being displayed in a colorbox (even when trying with jQuery Live). Found a solution on (surprise) StackOverflow.

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Shortcodes in WordPress Widgets

I was setting up a new WordPress site on a theme I purchased, and got aggravated that I couldn’t seem to use the shortcodes included with the theme within text widgets. Google to the rescue. If you go to edit your theme’s functions.php file, add this line: add_filter(‘widget_text’, ‘do_shortcode’); You’ll be able to use shortcodes [...]

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Install Snow Leopard From SD Card

This came in immensely useful for me today, for reasons too long to discuss.

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Seagate Momentus XT – Boot Times

I did a few more tests to try to record differences in boot times. I re-installed (well, re-imaged anyways) the Momentus XT while hooked up as an external drive. I re-installed it, and the subsequent boot times (as it “learned” what files to store on the SSD portion of the drive) looked something like this: [...]

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Seagate Momentus XT – Hybrid HD

Two weeks ago, my wife and I returned from a vacation to Montreal. As fate would have it, the next morning (before I had a chance to make a clone, which I do on a nightly basis when I’m not on vacation), my hard drive up and died. System lockups. Half booting into OSX but [...]

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