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Saw this Clinton vs. Obama demographic visualizer on Signal vs. Noise - pretty cool. I’ll keep my own opinions to myself, but definitely check it out.

Spotted this on uncrate. Hey - call me feminine but I like candles just as much as the next person. Otherwise my room just smells like dirty laundry.

http://www.hotwicks.com/ 

After you order, you can use their Pizza tracker online. It’s not perfect, but it’s still pretty cool. The best part is the fine print. First, I’ll premise it with their slogan “You Got 30 Minutes” meaning in 30 minutes you’ll have your pizza. Since that’s never going to be true in all cases (as it was for me tonight), they put in this bit of legal copy.

‘Because safety is a priority “You Got 30 Minutes™” is not a guarantee but an estimate. You may get more.’

Nice.

With Macworld coming up, I cooked up a theory. I’ll lay it out right now. Apple’s going to update the Apple TV with Blu-ray playback and HD content in the iTunes store including movie rentals.

The last two mentions (HD content) are kind of part of the package, but I’ll explain my Blu-ray theory.

Three major studios jumped to Blu-ray in the past week (Warner, New Line and Paramount with Warner and Paramount leaving HD-DVD. Sony and Apple have always had a close relationship. Apple’s said they would support Blu-ray if they got into the HD game.

With such sudden and active response in the HD market (which, granted, could be due to holiday sales), it seems too clear that there’s some insider info we don’t know about. If I’m right, you can expect Apple to increase its customer support (1-on-1s) to handle educating customers on how to create HD menus for Blu-ray, which (again, if I’m right) was probably a contractual agreement with Sony.

If this is all true, and let’s be serious - it’s probably not, then let’s hope the price of the Apple TV drops a bit too. $200 would be a great price point if it included a Blu-ray player.

And by that I don’t mean increase your site’s page rank, I mean increase your page rank. Have you ever Googled your name? Probably. You know who else does? Potential employers and stalkers. You probably don’t want the former finding pictures of your with dicks drawn on your face, passed out in a pool of your own vomit. So what’s an average guy/girl to do? Step 1: find some blogs that you like and post a comment leaving your name the same way it would be searched in Google. Leave a good comment too. Step 2: create some profiles for social networking sites and other popular sites that will show up when Googled (Amazon, Virb, etc).

Don’t fake it though. Post on stuff you care about. If you’re into cooking, post comments on recipes or post some of your own. If you’re into deep sea fishing, post some reviews about some equipment you’ve used. But definitely use your full name the same way some potential Googler would search for it. You don’t want people judging you incorrectly before they meet you, right?

So, I had my first run in with using PHP and JSON together. In PHP 5.2 and greater, there is native JSON support, so I started there first. It seemed to work just fine when the JSON objects were simple, but when they got complex and very nested, it failed every time.

After much hair pulling, a friend helped me out. The JSON I was getting back from the web service I was querying (Brightcove in this case) was not utf-8 encoded. Once I manually encoded it to utf-8, it worked.

But, it wasn’t over yet. I then ran into the issue that I couldn’t get any information out of the damn decoded response. However, once I passed a second optional argument to json_decode() (I passed in true), I was able to get my response as an associative array, and all was right with the world.

Since JSON itself is a relatively hot topic in web technologies, I wanted to throw this post out there to help people in case they run into the same issue I had.

Well, you were, until I searched the intertubes and found a solution. If you’re saving anything for the web and you’ve upgraded from CS2 to CS3, you might notice that when you “Save For Web & Devices” that the images are all washed out. Now, usually this is due to the Color Profile not being correct (should be sRGB), but when I realized that I was working in sRGB, I started going crazy. It seemed like nothing I did was working correctly.

But, alas, tonight I found the answer. There are two new “defaults” Adobe threw at us web developers/designers without really telling us where they were. There are two articles that finally got me to stop banging my head against the wall, so thank you Tancredi and Adobe (make sure to check out the image attachment for the Adobe link).

So, if you’ve found yourself in the same place, hopefully this takes care of it for you.

Continuing with my “I’m dumb about some stuff, so others might be too”, I decided to finally look up what “et al” meant. I see it all the time but can’t figure out what it means in context. I looked it up today, and it simply means “and others”. That’s all. You can read a further definition at Answers.com.

There are some things that I’ve learned along the way, and to be honest I’m embarrassed that I learned them so late in the game. For instance, just this week I learned what unit testing is - it’s kind of cool incidentally. But, one of those things that confused me for a while was the concept of what a “framework” was. I knew about languages, obviously, but I didn’t understand where frameworks fit into the picture. Was it a special kind of language? Was a framework just a skeleton directory structure? For those that are experience, these are dumb questions. But I feel as though there are no dumb questions, and if I stumbled with it then someone else might as well.

So, to answer the question, a framework is simply a structured way of writing in a programming language. Let’s take Ruby on Rails for example. The programming language is Ruby - you can’t program in “Rails”. You could use Ruby and create files and classes one at a time and make your application that way, but frameworks can help out here. If you’re creating something that’s been encountered and created time and time again, there’s a good chance there’s a framework for it to help speed development along in a clean way. Rails does that. Want to set up a blog? Piece of cake. A shopping cart? No problem. How about an mp3 player? Eh, not so much. You know what’s a good framework for that? Flex. Flex uses a specific XML syntax in combination with Actionscript 3 to quickly churn out some standard Rich Internet Applications.

I’m not sure if I’ve lost anyone yet, but things like Flex, Rails and CakePHP are all frameworks - not programming languages. Each framework uses a specific programming language that’s best suited for the tasks at hand, but a framework is just a conveniently setup structure of files, methods, etc. to aid in development, and if the shoe fits it can really help speed up development time.