http://www.techyouruniverse.com Musings about technology from a Geek Tue, 30 Jun 2009 04:12:51 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I attended Robogames in San Francisco this past weekend with my 3 sons. We had a great time watching the robots try to kill each other. I let out a Tim Allen grunt at several points, especially when we saw one of the robots with a flame thrower. I had some ... http://www.techyouruniverse.com/software/what-software-developers-can-learn-from-battlebots SPAM. No, not the barely edible processed meat, I'm talking about unsolicited messages we all receive, typically via e-mail. BTW - a common misconception is that SPAM is all junk mail. By the nerdiest of definitions, spam is only the unsolicited messages. If you signed up for a newsletter or ... http://www.techyouruniverse.com/technology/the-cure-for-spam-forever Every major language now has tools for JSON encoding a string of text, which is a format that is natively read, understand, and used by Javascript. PHP's json_encode works great, I use it all the time for data transport. The reasons for using XML are getting harder and harder to ... http://www.techyouruniverse.com/software/why-on-earth-doesnt-javascript-have-a-json_encode My Apple MacBook Air has a built in iSight camera. I wanted to have it take pictures automatically every minute and save them in a folder for an upcoming home improvement project, effectively turning it into a time lapse camera. It's also good for being able to take pictures of ... http://www.techyouruniverse.com/technology/automatic-isight-capture-to-have-your-mac-be-a-time-lapse-camera From Incremental Operations Blog, this call stack shows the layers involved in a [typical?] Java stack. To be fair, this is not necessarily Java itself, but poorly written Java code. But based on my experience, this type of excessive architecture is accepted best practice in the Java world, and the ... http://www.techyouruniverse.com/software/php-vs-java-vs-cc-for-web-applications It's time to unwind the giant mess of 301's, meta tag, and robots.txt hacks that we have in place -- all aimed and eliminating "duplicate" content for search engines. We now have a simple way to tell search engines what the canonical representation of a url. That's the promise of ... http://www.techyouruniverse.com/wikia/google-canonical-href-with-mediawiki Want to know the magic secret to building scalable apps? Don't have blocking calls. Think back to all the performance problems you've ever had. Chances are your app was waiting on one of the following: Database HTTP ( a remote web service) File system (either local or remote [NFS]) Some other blocking service Remove all ... http://www.techyouruniverse.com/technology/i-only-block-for-memcached With dozens of them, displaying them all is rediculous (although I've seen it). Why not just display the ones that the user visits? This write up (from someone I work with at Wikia) explains how - by using the CSS for "visited" links. http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/socialhistoryjs/ A bit creepy, but interesting enough to pass along. http://www.techyouruniverse.com/technology/automatically-figure-out-which-social-bookmarking-site-to-use-with-css I've built this one up for a few years, and now it's time to share. Notable features: Syntax highlighting Test compile for syntax errors. This means that every time you write the file, it will check the file for syntax errors and alert you immediately. This saves much back and forth with ... http://www.techyouruniverse.com/software/ultimate-vimrc-file-good-for-php-bash-ruby-and-others Dear Steve Jobs, Right now I use Verizon Wireless broadband. It's better than not having it, but I would much prefer to have it built into my Macbook Pro. Right now I have external USB device, and while it works, it is clunky at best. Please partner with AT&T, so that ... http://www.techyouruniverse.com/technology/apple-please-put-wireless-broadband-in-every-macbook