For anyone that’s ever wanted to properly read XKCD on an iPhone
The Practice of Code
prac•tice [prak-tis]
noun, verb, -ticed, -tic•ing.
- do (something) repeatedly so as to become skillful.
- do (something) reguarly as part of one's normal behavior.
- be working in (a particular profession).
- (practiced) expert as a result of much experience.
- follow the teaching and rules of (a religion).
About
My name is Jason Discount. I am an American living in Australia where I develop software primarily for primary schools and manage servers.
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Compiling MTR for Mac OS X Snow Leopard
Top Ten One-Liners from CommandLineFu Explained - good coders code, great reuse
Absolute gold. Some real gems in there.
Facebook Helper for OS X
If any OS X users out there are using Facebook Contact Sync, Smart Sync for Facebook, Beejive or any other Mac or iPhone app that places Facebook contact information into your iPhone address book, you might have noticed when viewing those contacts on your Mac, you see some bizarre URLs.
Clicking these URLs does nothing as your Mac doesn’t really know what to do with a URL that beings with “fb://”. So I’ve written a quick little helper to solve that problem.
eBay Australia Fixed For iPhones?
Well, I was pleasantly surprised to see links to eBay.com.au auctions start working again this weekend. It’s possible that it started working before then, but that’s when I decided to try it again.
It seems they’re initially directed to a mobilized version of eBay, but the ability to switch back to Classic is present in the footer.
Well done eBay for restoring what you had one year ago.
“You’re a Parliamentarian, in Australia, who believes the world you live in is less than 10,000 years old?!”
— Richard Dawkins to Senator Steve Fielding on Q & A
ABC Radio to Support iPhone
- Me (22/10/09): Radio Melbourne via iPhone? Hi, If I'm correct in my understanding, I can here [sic] John Faine on local analog radio, digital radio, or streaming from your site. I notice that you have an iPhone application, but I don't seem to get Radio Melbourne on it.
- ABC (23/02/10): Dear Jason, Currently we only stream 774 in Windows and Real formats. We don't currently have the resources to stream in MP3 format, which is what is required to stream to an iPhone. But we are working on getting MP3 streaming happening by the end of the year. We are sorry for the inconvenience, 774 ABC Melbourne
xkcd: Devotion to Duty
Brilliant! Combines my childhood love of Die Hard with adult love of system administration. (Don’t forget to hover!)
Privacy Concerns with Facebook’s Contact Sync
Last post, I pointed out some the issues I was having with SmartSync for Facebook. Most of the functionality provided by SmartSync is now available in Facebook’s official iPhone application since version 3.1, so I thought I’d test it out to see how it compares. Unfortunately, I didn’t get very far.
Issues with SmartSync for Facebook
In my iPhone First and 20 article, one of the “page two” applications I mentioned and recommended was Ultimake’s SmartSync for FaceBook. Unfortunately, I have to now retract that recommendation due to a few issues.
The first problem is stability. There is nothing that frustrates me more than an unstable application. The app’s process is as follows. On its first launch, it scans your iPhone’s address book (I have around 900 contacts). It then downloads your friend list from Facebook (I have around 350 friends) and tries to find matches (I have around 225 matches). It then presents a list of all the matching contacts, allows you to resolve any conflicts or match any unmatched contacts, and then finally does its sync. If I don’t run the app immediately after a fresh restart while on a WiFi network, I rarely get anywhere near that far. It simply crashes exiting me back to the home screen.
