bob-ak.com

You may know that OS X adds its own additional resource/fork files to its file system.

If you’ve developed an application on a Mac but would like to release it on a Windows or Linux platform, you must get rid of these files.

To do so use the following line to tar your application:

COPYFILE_DISABLE=true tar -cvf YourTarFileName.tar DirectoryToTar/

Source: aaronlongwell.com

Want to learn about GIT? There’s tonnes of stuff out there but a very good introduction to GIT is called Git for the Lazy and it is simply priceless (if you’re into that sort of thing).

I got most of these ideas from trippermap.com and earthalbum.com:

Some cameras and phones set the geo data in the EXIF part of a JPEG photo. This is very handy but far from common. To get around this Flickr have developed their own mapping tool (go to the Organizer and select the map tab). This tool will allow you to drop your images anywhere on the world map. It’ll then obtain the geo data of the point dropped and adds it as a tag to your photo.

Once your photo has this information in it, you can submit it to various sites (or build you own) to place it in its correct location in the world map (can use Google or Yahoo maps who provide APIs for this).

In Flickr you can also add geo data tags manually provided you know the location yourself. Simply add the following tags to your photo:

geotagged
geo:lon=xxx.xxx
geo:lat=xxx.xxx

Another way to get geo data is to look up the location the photo was taken in a database (try Google maps or geonames.org). This is a little harder as you need programming knowledge on how to get the info back from these sources.

Finally you can use a host of desktop tools which will allow you to write EXIF data directly into your image.

Here’s a list from trippermap.com:
WMMX Location Stamper (Win)
GPSPhoto (Linux)
GPSPhotoLinker (MacOSX)
iMagine Photo (MacOSX)
EXIFutils (Command line)
itag (Win)

When I migrated from one host to another last week, I downloaded the latest version of the software (2.5.1) and installed it. This went very smoothly and all my posts from my old blog (was probably version 2.1?) came through.

Earlier today I went to add a new post and realised that the admin page was missing the most important buttons (Write, Manage, Design, Comments) which basically meant I couldn’t do anything!

I spent over an hour googling and looking through WP’s forums but found nothing that would explain this except references to old versions of plugi-ns (which I wasn’t using).

A few posts by WP staff on WP’s forum seemed top point the fault at the user and not the software. The thing is that I didn’t touch my blog since I did a fresh install of WP 2.5.1.

Anyways, I had to intsall the new version (2.6) and it all fell into place.

The only good thing was that I had a back up of my WP blog, otherwise I’d have lost some data here.

Doesn’t look great for WP or maybe it’s one of those things that happens to software (!!).

Detailed accounts of Corey Trager‘s interview at Google. He didn’t get the job but he describes the interview and all the psychology before/during and after the interview very well. Link

This is not exactly a big achievement – although it took a while to build (worked late on a number of occasions), I’m quite proud of it! I had to get familiar with Google Map’s API and understand the basics of screen (or data) scraping. For this I found a very good web site (oooff.com) which had great examples. If you know PHP you can pick this up very quickly. If you don’t know PHP, do not worry as you can either learn the basics of it pretty quickly or you can buy an already made data scraping too (search the web – don’t forget Yahoo!).

Here’s in my first mashup application – the flights information data is taken from BAA’s web site. Good luck!

Last week I installed WampServer (Version 2.0) on my work PC. Since then, I’ve played around with Apache/PHP and, to a lesser extent, MySQL. My initial thoughts are that this WAMP seems to include a lot of good support for changing the three modules’ core functionality which I had not seen in other WAMPs before.

For example, I wanted to install the GD library in PHP – previously to do this, I would’ve had to edit 2 or 3 INI files and restart Apache to achieve this. All I have to do now is click on the Wampserver’s little icon and select GD library in the PHP menu. Simple! For this (and also the ease with which it installed), Wampserver gets a big thumbs up from me!