Just a moment ago I received an email from the NYPHP mailing list. They were passing ona job post that they found on Craigslist. They seemed to stumble upon a listing that is looking for a developer in the NYC area. Here are the requirements for the position.

Candidates must have strong knowledge of
Perl, PHP, HTML, XML, JavaScript, CGI, Apache, MySQL,
using standard, team-based web development practices.

One would expect a position with requirements like that to be high on the pay scale. I am not sure what company this post was made by however I am sure that they are off the rocker. Look closely and you will see that the compensation is $7 - $10 per hour. Who in their right mind who has 1+ years of experience with PHP would be willing to work for that little money, not to mention in NYC. Oh wait all of the 3rd world applicants are applying for the position. Things like this just make me sad.

Take a look at this post for yourself otherwise you might not believe it.

If you have been having problems getting the AJAX to work on your site, you might want to check IE 7’s security settings. I had an issue with the browser reports in the sidebar. They just would not load in IE 7 so i had to do some digging. It looks like IE FINALLY went to the native XMLHTTP support so you will not need to use the damn ActiveX component anymore (unless you are going for backwards compatability). The new XMLHTTP method is enabled by default but there is a setting that is disabled by default. The setting that is disable prevents the site from using the XMLHTTP object. I am not sure why they would do this, there are going to be a lot of angry users out there.

Setting something that the world is becoming more and more attached to is just wrong in my opinion. Here is what you need to do in order to make AJAX enabled sites work in IE 7.

Go to Tools -> Internet Options -> Security -> Custom Level and check the box next to “Access data sources across domains” This should allow sites to run the AJAX enabled content or not…. Is there another checkbox hidden down even deeper?

Today I installed the final release of Vista on my Mac Pro with Boot Camp. I must say it is working rather well. The blue-tooth keyboard and mouse seem to be working better than in XP. Microsoft must have bumped up the bluetooth support in Vista.

There are a few issues though (and I have yet to dig for a solution) When you installed XP you had to create a drivers disk with the Boot Camp Assistant. With Vista it detects the video card and supports that however there are still several devices that are not recognized. I tried to install the Windows XP drivers but a fatal error occurred during the install (I figured it would fail). However now I need to find the Apple Vista drivers and I am not sure they even released any.

I am going to do some digging but I do think Vista runs better than XP on the Mac Pro.  The one thing in particular that I noticed and do not like is the fact that both XP and Vista only see one of the 2 processors in the machine and only 2 of the 4 GB of ram that the machine has.

Tonight I was working on the BrowserReports site and altered the spy feature that we had. Now you can spy on your own domains referals. An example would be this page.

Also notice on the sidebar of this site I am showing the last 10 referers. Keep watching it, it will reload automatically using AJAX to get the referers from BrowserReports.

:: EDIT ::
I just noticed that the sidebar is not working on IE 7 in Windows Vista. I will be diagnosing this soon and getting that fixed. Sorry to all of those who are using it.

Ok so I figured out what the issue was. IE is what is stopping it, go to Tools -> Internet Options -> Security -> Custom Level and check the box next to “Access data sources across domains” This should fix the issue.

Last night I decided to attempt to install XP SP2 with BootCamp on my new Mac Pro. Everything was going smooth, I got the OS to install perfectly, the Apple drivers worked like a charm. It seemed everything was flawless, I even got the bluetooth keyboard and mouse to work in Windows which many people said was not possible. I had everything setup and it was time to reboot to OS X. I restarted the computer and held down the alt/option key waiting to see the screen where I could choose which OS to load. To my surprise it just booted into Windows without ever showing me the screen to choose the OS.

I did some quick Googling and found that the bluetooth keyboard was not working at that point. My options were limited. I had to keep a wired keyboard sitting next to my computer so that I could boot to the OS choice screen. In my opinion this was not logical. Why should I have to do that when the bluetooth keyboard works with the Mac on boot? I can restart and hold down the eject key to get the optical drive to eject, so why can I not get it to boot to the OS choice screen? I have been unable to come up with an answer for that. This brought up the thought of… “maybe there is a configuration file I can edit to make the OS choice screen show up on every boot and auto boot a default OS after a specified amount of time..” I did some digging but could not find anything. Was there not a bootloader like Lilo or Grub for this?

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday my girlfriend showed me an email that she got. I thought it was pretty funny considering I live in Vermont

Last night I installed Parallels and today I installed Windows 2000. While it is great that you can run windows on OSX in a Window or Full Screen mode. Coherence mode is what takes the cake. When running in this mode you can literally run windows applications within OS X. Below you will see a screen shot of Internet Explorer running on my system.

This is a really nice feature and makes Parallels well worth the $79 that they are charging. I am excited to see how the rest of things run such as games, etc. There is only one issue that I have found with parallels and that is when you are running in Coherence mode and you insert a CD or DVD windows tries to control it and OS X does not see it. To fix this you have to temporarilly disable the optical drive. I hope they fix that so that both OS X and windows will see the drive, otherwise it’s just a pain in the butt.

I did say that I would be running a benchmark on my old system and the new system and I have. I have to get things setup but you will soon see a post with the benchmark results.

I am not sure if you are keeping up with American Idol or not but some of the people they are getting this year are the worst I have ever seen on the show.  Last night the final person from NYC knew they could not sing at all and knew that they were tone deaf.  She decided to go to the show because people would make fun of her when she would sing.

At the end she was pretty much begging for the judges to take her on and “teach” her everything she needed to know so that she could be the next American Idol….  WHAT WAS SHE THINKING?  Did she seriously think they would say sure we can do that…

There was one girl however who could sing but the judges would not give her a chance.  She was previously on the show and went to Hollywood and was cut.  She has taken all of the judges criticism to heart and tried to improve on everything they have told her in the past.  I am not sure why they would not give her another chance, she was good.  I am not saying she would go all the way because there is not a doubt in my mind that she would be cut before the final show.  She was trying so hard during the audition and begging for them to give her another shot, although she failed at getting another shot I think she will go far with her career.

Now the judges would not give the girl who was cut another chance, but the guy who willingly quit last year came in and got another chance.  Yes he does have a great voice, but why would they give him another chance when he gave up and not give the girl who was really trying another chance?

About 6 months ago I made the switch to the Mac platform.  The one thing that really bothered me was how the Mac handled the Home and End keys.  They did not seem to work as expected coming from a Windows platform.  I had tried searching for a solution and even asked some OS X guru’s on IRC.  However I was unable to come up with anything.

Today on the NY PHP Mailing List there was a thread about the Mac and how they should setup the development environment.  This seemed to quickly go way off topic and start talking about the must have apps for the Mac.  Rob Marscher from Affinitive LLC piped in and started telling us how he works with Linux machines at work and then has Mac’s at home.  He had always hated the way the Home and End keys have functioned as well.   Rob posted this link that shows how to re-map your Home and End keys to work as they do on a Windows machine.

On the page I started to read the comments and I found the application called DoubleCommand.  This is a very easy to install preference pane that allows you to customize quite a bit more than just the Home and End keys.  You can also save the settings for the System or only the current user.

DoubleCommand is another MUST HAVE utility for anyone coming to the Mac platform from the Windows environment.

Today i was browsing the web and I came accross GeekSuit.  On their website they have a php script that will connect to a pop email box and import the emails into an MySQL database.  The script comes with a rather nice GUI.  I could see someone using this script to setup a free web based email service.  People would register for the site and this script would run on a cron job to monitor a catch all email box.

When the script runs it would check the to email address and see if it matches any of the current members, if it does it would do the import.  If free email services were not popping up all over the net this would be a great addition to the world wide web.  However they are just about everywhere and some such as GMail even offer close to 3GB of storage space.

One web based email application that seems to get great reviews is HiveMail.  You can theme it just like you would vBulleting (popular forum application) and you can even integrate the 2 applications.  While HiveMail is not free there are several open source solutions for web based email as well.  SquirrelMail, Horde, many more.