Monthly Archives: August 2011
Posted by Michael Alfaro on August 24, 2011
The day was coming for a while now, and it’s finally here, Steve Jobs is stepping down as CEO and Tim Cook the COO will take over. Looks like stocks took a bit of a hit as the news came out. Hopefully Apple won’t go the path of Microsoft after Bill Gates stepped away, but we really won’t know until he’s completely done with Apple. Steve will still be there as the Chairman of the Board so I’m sure his very necessary input will be taken :)
Here’s the link to the text from his resignation letter:
http://news.yahoo.com/text-letter-steve-jobs-resigning-apple-ceo-225627625.html
Topics: business, design, information architecture, inspiration, interfaces, internet, technology
Posted by Michael Alfaro on August 17, 2011
Apps stopped working today due to expiring passwords for our staging oracle box, which was annoying to say the least. Here’s how you keep that from happening:
ALTER PROFILE DEFAULT LIMIT
FAILED_LOGIN_ATTEMPTS UNLIMITED
PASSWORD_LIFE_TIME UNLIMITED;
Thanks to Odi for the information to remove it: http://www.odi.ch/weblog/posting.php?posting=520
Topics: database, development, technology
Posted by Michael Alfaro on August 16, 2011
As I’m reading the release notes for firefox 6 (I know, who ever reads those anyway… me :) ), I see they have this:
“Added Scratchpad, an interactive JavaScript prototyping environment”
Of course I follow the link and see the demo someone put together to show how you can write javascript right within scratchpad to prototype quickly (“an interactive JavaScript prototyping environment”, they nailed it). Check out the video to see how it works, Awesome is all I have to say:
http://people.mozilla.org/~rcampbell/Canvas%20Demo_1.webm
Topics: development, internet, technology, website curation
Posted by Michael Alfaro on August 16, 2011
Wasn’t it like a few months ago, really… wasn’t it? According to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox), 3 major point releases this year, but it really looks like they’re just skipping the minor point releases and working on speed, security and stability. Here’s what we have thus far in 2011:
| 4.0 |
March 22, 2011 |
| 4.0.1 |
April 28, 2011 |
| 5.0 |
June 21, 2011 |
| 5.0.1 |
July 11, 2011 |
| 6.0 |
August 16, 2011 |
And before the end of 2011 we’ll have Firefox 7 which is in the “Aurora” channel currently: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/channel/
Check out their 6 week release cycles (Pinaki, please note another group on the web is using our “Awesomeness” verbiage!):
What’s even crazier is this is how the channels work:
“New work doesn’t land on Aurora and Beta. Instead, those channels focus exclusively on working with our heroic and growing community of testers to spot any unexpected issues introduced during development, and then resolve them. Looking at this diagram, you might well conclude that we’d have a release ready every 18 weeks.
Aurora and Beta are so single-minded in their focus on stabilization and testing, though, that many engineers can move on to new work. If we take a step back and look at the broader picture, this is what actually happens:”
Original source: http://blog.mozilla.com/futurereleases/2011/07/19/every-six-weeks/
Topics: development, internet, technology
Posted by Michael Alfaro on August 16, 2011
This was a simple one to look up and I wasn’t going to post it, but the original poster gave a great explaination in the comments as to how it works, line by line. Here’s the original source:
http://dense13.com/blog/2008/02/27/redirecting-non-www-to-www-with-htaccess/
Here’s the code:
“RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]"
Here’s the explanation:
“Sure! The first line sets a condition: only if the condition is true, the second line will be processed. The condition could be ‘translated’ to: “if the host name doesn’t start with www.”. The regular expression !^www\. means this:
! = not
^ = start
\. = . (the backslash is the escape character, because dots have a special meaning in regular expressions, and therefore must be escaped)
So !^www\. means “doesn’t start with www.”.
The second line is the actual rewrite rule: again it uses regular expressions to match certain urls, and then rewrites them to something else. The first part is the regular expression:
^(.*)$
This means: anything! You already know the ^ sign. The (.*) bit means zero or more characters (the dot means any character, the asterisk means zero or more). The final $ means ‘end’.
Then comes the bit that says how to rewrite the url:
http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]
%{HTTP_HOST} will be replaced by the host name (i.e. dense13.com).
$1 references whatever was matched in the regular expression between the brackets, which in this case is everything.
The [R=301,L] means “inform the user agent that this is a permanent redirect (HTTP 301 code), and don’t process any more rewrite rules (if there were any after this one).
If you’re not familiar with regular expressions, this might still look a bit abstract, feel free to ask for more details. :)”
Here’s my thanks, Great work!
Topics: development, internet, technology, website curation
Posted by Ed Roney on August 6, 2011
http://nfarina.com/post/8239634061/ios-to-android
It compares some aspects of developing natively for Android from the perspective of an iOS (and Windows Mobile) developer. Very well done and ties in a bit of the history of some of the differences. For example some UI consequences of changing from a smart phone OS that is more like a Blackberry to something that would compete with an iPhone.
Some nice tidbits for those developing native apps for both platforms.
Topics: Android, development, iOS, iPhone, mobile
Posted by Ed Roney on August 6, 2011
Never have been a fan of forced registration for purchasing online, in some cases it made me not buy at all. Very well put article on the subject, just wonder if it’s enough to make retailers re-think their approach.
From User Interface Engineering, via BoingBoing.net
http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button
How Changing a Button Increased a Site’s Annual Revenues by $300 Million
It’s hard to imagine a form that could be simpler: two fields, two buttons, and one link. Yet, it turns out this form was preventing customers from purchasing products from a major e-commerce site, to the tune of $300,000,000 a year. What was even worse: the designers of the site had no clue there was even a problem.
The form was simple. The fields were Email Address and Password. The buttons were Login and Register.The link was Forgot Password. It was the login form for the site. It’s a form users encounter all the time. How could they have problems with it?
Topics: business, e-commerce, UI, UX, website
Posted by Christine Robinson on August 2, 2011
We’ve always made digital personal, and as we grow we want to make sure that we always hold onto that tradition. How can we increase our office space, our clientele, the complexity and frequency of our work without losing our personality? Easy, we need more awesome people.
We’re looking for creative, talented, passionate digital maestros to join the Local Wisdom family as we take it to the next level. We prize our diverse culture of experts who drive their work with a passion for success and produce work that brings results. We want to continue that culture with some new faces in the office. And, for those of you thinking responsibly, we have comprehensive health and dental benefits and insurance for those fancy cars. Below are the positions we are looking to fill. Check ‘em out!
Client partner
Web curator
Web developer
Senior information architect
Junior information architect
Mobile app developer
Visit our Careers section for full listings and job descriptions.
