In the early days of the Internet a bleeding edge company called Tribal Voice released Powwow which defined most of the features in modern chat programs. Things like online status, and multiple chat windows, and even voice chat.
Before the modern look of Windows was established by Windows 95, there was Windows 3.11 WFW (Windows For Workgroups) and Powwow was there. In those days, internet users could purchase Netscape 2.0 from their ISP to use on Dial-up connections. These days Mozilla doesn’t sell Netscape, they give away FireFox. A lot has changed, and a lot hasn’t.
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ablemac Uncategorized
Apple is patching more than Microsoft, or is it the other way around? That must mean one has a better OS than the other, right? This whole argument is flawed.
How many patches are for things that can actually be exploited.
Web Servers for example, IIS on Windows, and Apache on OS X, aren’t enabled by default. Patching them doesn’t make them any safer; they’re not even running.
It amazes me how no one ever seems to count the things that count. “They” just count everything and argue over who’s doing more good.
The question should not be “how many things could need a patch?” but rather, “how many things DO need a patch?”
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ablemac Tech Debunk, Patches, Security, Software Update
Code Signing for iPhone App development has several pieces. It helps to have a complete list with descriptions.
1. Developer Certificate
2. Public Key
3. Private Key
4. CertificateSigningRequest.certSigningRequest
5. Developer.mobileprovision
6. AdHoc.mobileprovision
7. AppStore.mobileprovision
8. Xcode Project
Things get a little more complicated when there’s more than one developer, or more than one project, but these are the basics. Make sure all this works first, then move on.
We start by opening Keychain Access on our development mac and produce a certificate signing request. It’s during the generating of that signing request that keychain generates the encryption key pair (public & private keys). The signing request will be submitted to the iPhone Developer Portal (website). After the signing request is submitted and accepted at the iPhone Dev Portal, you can download the Developer Certificate and double click to add it to your keychain.
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ablemac Tech Code Signing, Developer Certificates, Encryption, iPhone Developer, iPhone OS 3.0, iPhone SDK 3.0
In real life there are push button switches that you push down, and they stay down. Push again and they come back up. On the iPhone the default control for this behavior is the UISwitch which slides from “on” to “off” and back.
The switch is a great UI concept, but it didn’t fit into my latest design concept, so I used the standard UIButton. In the Interface Builder it’s easy to drop in a “Round Rect” button, but there is no setting to “stay on” when pressed. The UISwitch has a “Momentary” check box, which means “Turn back off when released”.
My first instinct was to track the button’s state in the view controller and swap images in code. This is where reading saves a ton of time.
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ablemac Tech iPhone
If you’re a developer, you know that 1,000 new APIs means more software you don’t have to write to get the job done. You also know that’s about 1,000 more things you need to learn to use as quickly as possible so your competition doesn’t get a head of you.
This can be a scary concept for new developers, but if that’s you, don’t let it get to you. The truth is that there are way more APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) than any one project will ever actually use. It will be possible to come up with incredibly new and creative Apps using a small portion of the current APIs for years to come.
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ablemac Tech
Drupal - open source content management platform
After a year with both systems installed, I’ve come to the conclusion that
Drupal is overkill for my needs.
WordPress is a much simpler solution, and it really does everything I need, plus a little more. The biggest difference I kept having to deal with was the “blocks” in Drupal.
This really became an issue when I switched to a template that didn’t show the login block because I had moved it to a section that wasn’t implemented in that template. I had to hack my own site (sort of) to force a log in block to show up, just so I could change the template back. Let that be a warning to all you Drupal template designers, make sure login shows up somewhere.
Wm
ablemac Tech drupal, wordpress
Spring comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. Well, here is the coming of spring in Montana this year.
ablemac General clouds, snow, spring
On our way back from hiking up to a mountain lake we saw this deer standing in a field. Just thought I’d snap a couple picks from my iPhone when I realized it was standing behind a no hunting sign, well that was just icing on the cake.
Wm
ablemac General nature
Today the iPhone App for WordPress was released (free), so i’ve installed it to give it a go and see how good it is. It seems to be extremely easy so far.
The only tricky thing so far was turning on XML-RPC. It’s a check box in your admin section of your WordPress web site under settings/writing.
Wm
ablemac Tech iPhone