Technology

General technology.

By Xenoveritas, 20 October, 2009

iDon't care...

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Technology

So apparently Verizon has decided it needs to take the iPhone head on, and is running a campaign that makes various points all starting with "iDon't." (Some of them are pretty damned weak, like "iDon't run widgets.")

Then it jumps from clean and Apple-like to noisy and - well, honestly, it reminds me of a traditional horror movie promo. "Coming November, it's DROID. DROID is a trademark of Lucasfilm Ltd. and it's related companies."

By Xenoveritas, 27 March, 2009

Poorly Documented iPod Touch Button Combos

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Technology

Probably the most important one to know is the "reboot" combo for when the iPod Touch crashes. Er, I mean if. Most of the rest of these were discovered while trying to reboot my crashed iPod Touch.

There are basically two buttons on the iPod Touch: the Sleep/Wake button on the top, and the Home button on the face. Rather than write "Sleep/Wake" out each time, I'm just going to call it the Sleep button.

So, here are the button combos:

Hold Sleep for 5 seconds: bring up the "turn off iPod" UI, or turn the iPod back on if it's off.

By Xenoveritas, 12 August, 2008

Fun With Copy/Paste

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Web
Technology

While looking through some JSPs, I noticed something:

<%@ page language="java"
  contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8"
  pageEncoding="UTF-8"%>

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
  content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

I've highlighted the important parts. The web server is set to tell the browser that the page is encoded in UTF-8. The page itself, on the other hand, tells the browser it's ISO-8859-1.

By Xenoveritas, 30 April, 2008

iTunes Sucks

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Technology
Music

So iTunes apparently decided to crap out and destroy its own library.

What does it do? It crashes on loading its XML backup, overwrites it preventing me from reimporting it, and then proceeds to wipe my iPod clean.

Leaving me with absolutely no way to restore my playlists.

You'd think they could import the metadata from the iPod, but of course not. It just deletes everything.

Thanks a lot, Apple.

By Xenoveritas, 31 January, 2008

Thanks A Lot

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Web
Technology

I came across someone using a MySQL SET where they really should have been using a many-to-many mapping table. Wanting to know more about SET, though, I decided to open the MySQL documentation and look up SET in the index:

"Title: SET; Location: MySQL 5.0 Reference Manual" - repeated seven times, with a scroll bar indicating many more lines

In case you're wondering, every other line if you scroll down reads "SET" with a location of "MySQL 5.0 Reference Manual."

By Xenoveritas, 18 December, 2007

Refilling Status Bars Should Be A Capital Offense

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Technology

Well, maybe not a capital offense. But it should be grounds for a good smack, at least.

If you've used a computer you've probably run into an installer that does the Refilling Progress Bar Trick before. Where there's a progress bar that slowly fills up to 100%, only to immediately drop back to 0% and restart the process.

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