Mobile Web Browsers

With all the explosion on Mobile Web and Applications. Theres’ several offerings that let you create mobile web. Some great things to keep in mind is how your application will look like in the several mobile browsers that are out there, such as Mobile Safari (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch), Mobile Firefox (Android and others), Mobile Opera (Several platforms).

37 Signals goes into details on how to watch out for these issues and the solution of-course.

What they learned from building UI from 37Signals.com

Happy Hour 9 to 5

What is a Happy Hour? “Happy hour” is a marketing term for a period of time in which a restaurant or bar offers discounts on alcoholic drinks, such as beer, wine and cocktails. Which is practically ridiculous as consuming alcohol doesn’t specifically make one happy.

After all it was a marketing effort. But the REAL happy hour should be the time which you spend most of your day doing and infact most of your life. And this should be from 9 to 5. So literally Happy Hour is 9 to 5 as the book titled with the same name suggests.

Got iPhone Pwned?

Well after reading articles and dugg stories of the iPhone Pwnage Tool first being in existance, then being delayed from released, then being completely closed-out and shutdown and sold to a private company to finally being released on April 3rd, 2008. I was in complete awe and amazement. So I did what everyone who is an early adaptor and downloaded the tool, loaded it up on my MacBook Pro as quickly as I could. I ran into one issue which caused me a little delay (my home Mac was the primary sync point for my iPhone). If I were to use the tool on the iPhone from my MBP it’d erase my music/videos and this would cause me to listen to nothing on my way back home.

This is where AFPd came in handy, I created a private WiFi network, connected to the iPhone and copied over all of my music to this iTunes Library into a new playlist (which will now sync to the iPhone). Once that was done I “erase and sync”ed the iTunes with the iPhone. Now I was ready to Pwn my iPhone. I was then missing the ipsw files required by the Pwnage tool, which I was easily able to download thanks to ‘iphone.unlock.no’.

I then put my phone into recovery-mode and was able to use the iPwner tool to flash the rom (using the downloaded 1.1.4 ipsw)

Then I created a new custom 1.1.4 ipsw using the Pwnage tool & the original 1.1.4 ipsw.

Once the iPhone was pwned, I restored it using the new custom ipsw that I just created using iTunes (option + restore button, select file)

Automatic Plug-in updates!

Oh my!! I just upgraded my WordPress to version 2.5. It is beautiful! and its got this new awesome cool thing going for it… more like for me. After I copied over all of the plug-ins that I had on my older wp 2.3.1, I went to check the plug-ins section and it showed me all of the plug-ins and they were showing up properly.

Then the new thing that I noticed was that there were some plug-ins that were old and their new-counterparts are available to download, there is a link to either go to the download-page and manually do the stuff, OR I can simply click on the “update automatically link” and wordpress fetches the download file and updates the plugin! all under 5 seconds, where as the manual method would atleast take 2-5 minutes!

This is definitely an amazing feature!

Using AJAX with PHP & MySQL

Today I started reading the book: PHP & MySQL for Dummies. I figured that since I’ve been using web services, creating websites for so long and using a group of different technologies, why not learn the underlying programming languages that make the dynamics of the web. Hence the book PHP & MySQL for Dummies helps me out. I’ll admit that I’m a dummy in the area of PHP, but I’m not that dumb, I understand the context and how the systems work.

This book should help me in learning the powers of PHP and MySQL and give me the ability to create a more customized web solutions for my clients.

Lets get this done and make it happen.