My latest iPhone app, VegScan, has enterd the beta phase!

VegScan is a social tool / game that scans bar codes of products and allows people to quickly identify if an item is vegan or vegetarian. You earn points and achievements with the more items you add to the community.

You can sign up for the beta program at www.VegScan.com

As a professional web developer I have the authority to say this, Internet Explorer is a pain in the ass to support. IE 6 is the browser that shipped with Windows XP, so it was pretty wide spread. Every year on the web is like 10 years in any other industry. This makes IE 6 about 80 years old in practical terms, a literal antique. Microsoft is now on version 8 of Internet Explorer. IE6 is not considered a “modern browser”. Modern browsers honor web site development standards and promote a consistent visual experience are users. The most notable of these modern browsers are FireFox, Chrome, Safari, and even Opera.

In a nut shell, a web browsers is an interpreter of code. Programmers write the code to power a website, but the displaying and presentation of the site is up to the web browser. Modern browsers will all react the programmers code in a similar manner, this gives users a consistent experience and lets programmers worry more about making cool stuff instead of worrying about how to make their pages look consistent on all browsers. IE 6 doesn’t play by the modern rules, it does its own thing, which is often unpredictable. This means that programmers have to write special code just for people who use IE 6 to look at their site.

Despite IE 6 being a horrible browser that is full of security holes, people continue to use it which is mind blowing to me. Upgrading to IE 7 or IE 8 is free, and mandatory if you have Windows XP service pack 2 or 3 installed. Better yet, IE 6 doesn’t come with  Windows Vista or Windows 7. Get with the time people and upgrade your computers!

Because IE 6 is still widely used but doesn’t play by today’s rules so to speak, and it is old, the decision has been made, IE 6 MUST DIE!

Major website announced this week that they would be displaying special messages to IE 6 users telling them to upgrade to a modern browser or lose the use of the site. Some of the big boys behind this effort include Twitter, Facebook, Digg and YouTube. In time these sites are going to stop worrying about IE 6 users all together.

I think this is an amazing step towards the future and would like to see some of the larger websites join together to solve some of the webs other problems.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The best part is that everything this guy raps about is 100% correct.

It’s not secret my current favorite tech toys are my iPhone and Twitter.

I follow several hundred people of interest, and regularly use TwitterFon Pro, TweetDeck and Twitter.com to keep up with them all. For an elite group of people I follow on twitter I choose to have their updates pushed to me via SMS (text message) to my phone.

Sometimes I’m in area where I dont have reliable service to my phone (most of the meeting rooms at my work for some reason), and Twitter will try to send me an SMS message telling me that one of my good friends just made a tweet. If Twitter cant deliver that tweet for some reason, like the phone doesnt have service, Twitter simply stops sending message to your phone. There has been many times where i have thought to myself “damn Twitter is quiet today”, then I log onto Twitter.com and see a “is you device have trouble?” error. If i don’t go check the website, I have no idea that Twitter turned off SMS updates to my phone. Twitter is cool but they aren’t cool enough to send you an email saying “Hey your phone is screwed up, we are going to stop sending you SMS message until you fix it”. Atleast then the poor bastards like me who are addicted to twitter would know what we have to do.

Because I am such a Twitter addict, I have come up with a plan to end my frustrations with this problem. The solution? Use some evil “robots” to do my bidding. I have blogged about them before, I am talking about Cron and Curl. okokok, so they aren’t evil robots they are software running on my computer.

Twitter has an awesome API (Application Programming Interface) that allows you to do all sorts of sweet things using REST based http requests, including turning on and off SMS notifications to your phone.

cURL is an application that allows you to connect to web addresses from a command line.

cron is an application that allows you run application at scheduled intervals.

Can you guess where this is all going? Here is mathematical representation for you
((Twitter API + cURL) * cron(30 minutes)) = Happy Josh Highland

I have cron run the following command every 30 minutes (replace username and password with your own of course)

/usr/bin/curl -u user:password -d device=sms http://twitter.com/account/update_delivery_device.xml

I will never need to log onto twitter to turn on my SMS notifications ever again. In the event that Twitter disables notifications to my phone, every 30 minutes my evil robots enable MS messages to my phone. At most I will have 30 minutes of down time. I can live with that.

This is a perfect example of what one of my Computer Science professors told me… “If you have to do it more then 2 times write a script to do it for you”.

YouTube.com is now offering two video formats on their site, standard and high def (HD), but they only allow an option for you to embed the standard version. This tutorial is going to show you how to get maximum quality and take advantage of the HD videos that you embed in your blog posts or social networking profiles.

Step 1: Copy this code and paste it to wherever you intend to embed the video:

<object width="425" height="344">
<param value="http://www.youtube.com/v/YOURVIDEOCODEHERE&ap=%2526fmt%3D22" name="movie" />
<param value="window" name="wmode" />
<param value="true" name="allowFullScreen" />
<embed width="425" height="344" wmode="window" allowfullscreen="true" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/YOURVIDEOCODEHERE&ap=%2526fmt%3D22"></embed>
</object>

Step 2: Grab the direct link to your video. In case you’ve never done this before, it can be found to the right of the video player on YouTube or from your browser’s address bar.

Step 3: copy the alphanumeric URL varialbe at the end of the link you grabbed in step 2.

Step 4: The finishing touch involves making a simple change to embed’s URL source code to direct it to the HD version. To do this, you simply need to paste what you copied in step 3 into the part between /v/ and the & symbol in the embed code. I’ve labeled this “YOURVIDEOCODEHERE” in the embed code in Step 1.

Normal quality:

HD Quality:

On a project I maintain, we recently rolled up to JQuery 1.3.1 from JQuery 1.2.6. Upon doing so, several things instantly broke.

I started seeing errors on lines like this:

if($('input[@name=username]').val() != "")

I decided to check the JQuery 1.3 relase notes to see what had changed.

The first bullet point answered my problem:

The ‘@’ in [@attr] has been removed. Deprecated since 1.2 this old syntax no longer works. Simply remove the @ to upgrade.

As it turns out, the @ style selector was depricated and wasn’t suggested for use when JQuery 1.2 was released, but it was still supported. At 1.3 the @ style selector was removed all together, and as a result broke our code!

Following the upgrade instruction I removed the @ symbol from the selectors, and the code started running again.

The result:

if($('input[name=username]').val() != "")

A simple and effective upgrade, and a reason to closely pay attention to release notes

I saw  this video on @KurtyD’s blog, http://daradics.com. He said that the video had a transformational effect on him. I’m going to have to agree.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Recently I have been doing a lot of work with WordPress. I love WordPress. one of the things I like most about WordPress is the plugins and themes.

I recently bought a copy of the MimboPro theme. Mimbo is clean and very professional. More of a CMS theme then a blogging theme, prefect for what I want to use it for.

As I dug into MimboPro and WordPress, I realized something strange, the MimboPro theme doesn’t support paging in a category view. What this means is EVERY SINGLE post you make is shown on one page. If you have a very active site, like the one I’m working on, this quickly gets out of hand. Look at this image and you will see what I mean (click for full version).

One of the reasons I like MimboPro was the support that the authors of the theme offer. I headed over to their message forums and found other people like me asking for the Additon of Paged Navigation To Category Pages. The original post was 8 months ago, and no one had resolved anything. I made a post to the MimboPro authors only to be told that there is going to be a new theme that will handle this and it will be available at a deep discount to MimboPro owner. This upset me a bit, so taking matters into my own hand, I fixed what Mimbo wont, and I am handing out my own patch to solve this issue. Below are the instructions to hack your own files, or you can just download my zip file with the pre-hacked files.

Pre-Hacked Files:
Download with pre-hacked files: JoshHighlands_MimboPro_CategoryPagingHack.zip

DIY INSTRUCTIONS (click images for full sizes):

1. Save a copy of your current categories.php and styles.css files inside of the MimboPro theme directory to a safe location
2. Open up categories.php inside of the MimboPro theme directory, and find line 17
   
3. Comment line 17 with a double back slash (//)
   
4. Go to line 87 of category.php and add the following code
   
5. Save and close category.php
6. Open up style.css inside of the MimboPro theme directory
7. Add the following CSS code to the bottom of the file (should be close to line 852)
   
8. Save styles.css
9. Upload categories.php and styles.css to the MimboPro theme directory on your server
10. Everything should be working. Here is what my wordpress running MimboPro looks like
    

That’s it! MimboPro will now have paging in all of the categories. The next and previous links will only show up when you have enough posts. The WordPress default is 10 posts. You can edit the number of posts by going to change the number of posts to show on a category page, go into to the admin and under “setting” > “reading” you will find the option, as highlighted here.

If you had any problem reading the code in the image files, download the zip files with the pre-hacked files in them.

Download with pre-hacked files: JoshHighlands_MimboPro_CategoryPagingHack.zip

If you have any further questions, please post them in the comment.

OMG OMG OMG! WordPress 2.7 is almost here. Here is a long list of the changes that are going to be in the latest release. I have been a huge wordpress fan for some years now. Its always treated me well. Its treated me so well that I have decided to move my main website, notPopular.com, to the wordpress platform for content management. I’m really nervous though, I have done a lot of custom work on the notpop install of wordpress, and it isnt released yet. I hope that my plugins and custom code doesnt break to badly. I will have a full review of wordpress 2.7 once it is released later this week.