This 1.5TB ioSafe drive is fire-resistant to 1550 degrees, can be submerged in 10ft of water for 3 days, includes data recovery service, can be bolted to the floor, runs quietly and has cool lights on the front plate.

One of my Time Machine backup drives was recently knocked off the top of my wife’s MacPro tower and crashed onto the floor. Miraculously, the drive is still readable but OS/X says the disk is damaged and won’t let me write to it. Then the very next day I happened to be reading Gizmodo and saw the article on the ioSafe SSD. It’s a bit pricey because it’s a SSD but I decided to check out the ioSafe website. That’s when I saw that they carried linkCode=as4&creativeASIN=B001VKKZHQ&adid=0B5X1DW8CVWYED3NQTD3&”>non-SSD products as well – for a much more affordable price. So I bought the 1.5TB version. It comes pre-formatted as NTFS so I just used Disk Utility to reformat it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). The next trick I wanted to accomplish was moving two different Time Machine backups from two different drives onto the ioSafe drive. I thought I could just copy the backup folders onto the new drive, but according to different sources on the internet this won’t work properly. Instead people suggest using Super Duper, Carbon Copy Cloner or Disk Utility to move a Time Machine backup from one drive to another. After spending an hour trying to use Disk Utility to copy the old Time Machine disk I gave up. I decided that I was fine with starting a new time machine backup for both machines on the new ioSafe drive. So now my Time Machine backups can survive if disaster strikes.

I had a PSD with 25 layers, each layer was a different photo. I knew there had to be a quick and easy way to save out all the layers as JPGs – this is how:

(Go to File->Scripts->Export Layers to Files)

(Select the directory to save the photos, adjust your options and click “Run”)

That’s it! Quick and easy! (Only if you know what buttons to push and where!)

I just spent a few hours trying to figure out why phpMyAdmin was throwing this error:

phpMyAdmin – Error
Cannot start session without errors, please check errors given in your PHP and/or webserver log file and configure your PHP installation properly.

I eventually discovered it had something to do with php sessions. When looking at php.ini I noticed references to memcached:

/etc/php.ini:

session.save_handler = memcache
session.save_path = "tcp://192.168.100.242:11211?persistent=1&weight;=1&timeout;=1&retry;_interval=15"

A few searches on google revealed it to be a problem with the way phpmyadmin handles php sessions. By adding the following two lines of code to libraries/session.inc.php I was able to get phpmyadmin up and running.

phpmyadmin/libraries/session.inc.php:

// See bug #1538132. This would block normal behavior on a cluster
ini_set('session.save_handler', 'files');
ini_set('session.save_path' , "/var/lib/php/session");

Load testing is essential when building enterprise-grade websites or web-apps and I’ve used Load Runner for projects in the past. The only problem is that Load Runner costs $20k+ to use. Today I discovered SOASTA which bills itself as “affordable”. From what I can tell, the service offering is similar to Load Runner with the benefit of being able to run on any platform. The problem with Load Runner is that it’s Windows only. I haven’t used SOASTA but I’ll definitely keep it in mind for my next big project. Has anyone out there tried SOASTA and Load Runner? Which one do you think is better?

I usually hate toolbars. They take up precious real-estate in the browser window, create a visual distraction and provide little benefit. But then recently I encountered Wibiya. I don’t remember what website I was on, but I noticed a toolbar fade-in at the bottom of the browser window. It looked well designed so I was curious as to what functionality it provided. As I clicked on the Recent Posts, Random Post, RSS, Share and Twitter buttons I was sold. The whole toolbar integrated very nicely with the site and provided cool ways to explore content on the site and share the content across social networks. I definitely wanted to know who developed this toolbar so I took a look at the source and found the Wibiya.com website.

Wibiya is still in Beta and is invitation only (you can signup for an invite), but I was lucky enough to be given an invite. Wibiya is a javascript widget which makes it easy to integrate into any website. The buttons on the toolbar and the theme of the toolbar are managed through the Wibiya website. The only thing I’ve noticed is that Wibiya has some layout issues when viewed through my new favorite URL shortener http://su.pr. The Wibiya toolbar gets shoved halfway below the browser status bar so it’s unusable. I’m guessing that the issue is with how Su.pr <FRAME>s the website and Wibiya is trying to calculate the height of the browser window and uses a height offset. So I’ve added the following jQuery code which only loads Wibiya when the site is not being <FRAME>d which will be 99% of the time.

          jQuery(document).ready(function() {
            if (top.location==location) {
                jQuery.getScript("http://toolbar.wibiya.com/toolbarLoader.php?toolbarId=5165");
            }
          });

Check out the Wibiya toolbar at the bottom of your browser and tell me what you think!
(If you don’t see a toolbar at the bottom of your browser but you DO see a black toolbar at the TOP of the browser, you’re viewing my site through Su.pr. To exit Su.pr click here.)

On a separate note: I wish Su.pr was implemented more like Wibiya and didn’t have to shove your site into <FRAME>s

I just completed a little bit of magic to sort Wordpress categories based on the most recent entry in each category, and I thought I’d share:

function get_cat_order($categories) {
    foreach($categories as $category) {
        $cat_id=get_cat_ID($category);
        $myposts = get_posts('numberposts=1&category='.$cat_id);
        $arrstr.='"'.strtotime($myposts[0]->post_date).'"=>"'.$category.'",';
    }
    eval('$catorder=array('.substr($arrstr, 0, -1).');');
    ksort($catorder);
    $catorder=array_reverse($catorder);
    foreach($catorder as $key=>$val) {
        $sortedCategories[]=$val;
    }
    return $sortedCategories;
}

My function get_cat_order() accepts an array of categories and returns a sorted array:

$categories=array('Life','Technology','Style','Fitness','Food','Business');
$categories=get_cat_order($categories);

I then feed this sorted array to another function which creates the category features as displayed on my homepage. The result is a dynamic listing of categories based on the post_date of the most recent entry in each category. In other words, the category which has the most recent entry is displayed first and the other categories are listed in descending order.

Do you have a more efficient or more elegant solution? Let me know in the comments below. Constructive criticism is always welcome.

via NY Times:

“USAA, a privately held bank and insurance company, plans to update its iPhone application this week to introduce the check deposit feature, which requires a customer to photograph both sides of the check with the phone’s camera.

“We’re essentially taking an image of the check, and once you hit the send button, that image is going into our deposit-taking system as any other check would,” said Wayne Peacock, a USAA executive vice president.”

Fascinating. But it seems like this would increase fraudulent check deposits.

It really blows my mind to think how many innovations and advances have been made over the past 30 years. I remember when I first started reading about AI (artificial intelligence) and computer vision research in high school. It all seemed so Star Trek and futuristic. But now with devices like the iPhone and the Android platform we carry around a powerful device capable of pattern recognition, face detection and augmented reality.

First I needed to move Wordpress over to the new domain. Since both domains reside on the same server, this was fairly trivial. From the davidchiu.com site root I just copied over the entire site from the davidchiu.net site root:

[davidchiu@vps public_html]$ cp -R ../../davidchiu.net/public_html/* .

Then I edited the .htaccess file to add SEO friendly 301 redirects from davidchiu.net to davidchiu.com:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://davidchiu.com/$1 [L,R=301]
</IfModule>

I actually kept some of the htaccess rewrite conditions from Wordpress and changed the rewrite rule. The reason why I did this is so that any old links to davidchiu.net would be correctly redirected to davidchiu.com but if I decide to put new files on davidchiu.net, I will be able to access those new files.

The last thing I needed to do is re-configure Wordpress. First I had to login to the old Wordpress admin http://davidchiu.net/wp-login.php, go to “Settings”, and change the Wordpress URL and Blog URL to the new domain – http://davidchiu.com:

Once the settings are saved, Wordpress redirects me to the new domain Wordpress login. And I’m finished! Now the site has been migrated over to the new domain and it took me longer to write this post than to do the actual work !

I’m working on a small UGC video contest site and have been evaluating different turnkey solutions. One of my main considerations is that the contest is launching in September so I have very little time for implementation. Twistage is at the top of my list right now because not only do they handle video transcoding and have CDN options, but according to their site it’s possible to integrate their services “…in a single afternoon.”

This is highly possible. I already have a prototype site that was built in less than a day that uses the YouTube API for video transcoding and delivery but the caveat is that the videos would also appear on YouTube and for some clients this is not ideal.

Other services I’m considering are:

Viddler

Hey!Watch

Ankoder

Encoding.com

Panda

“Kickstarter is a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, explorers…”

From the Kickstarter FAQ:

What is Kickstarter?

Kickstarter is a new way to fund ideas and endeavors.

We believe that…

• A good idea, communicated well, can spread fast and wide.
• A large group of people can be a tremendous source of money and encouragement.

Is Kickstarter an investment mechanism?

No. People who use Kickstarter to fund their projects (“project creators”) keep 100% ownership and control.

What’s in it for the people who pledge?

Project creators can offer products, services or other benefits (“rewards”) to inspire people to support their project: A hot-air balloon ride to the first person to pledge $300, an invitation to the BBQ for anyone who pledges more than $5, exclusive daily video updates for anyone who pledges more than $1. It’s up to each project creator to sculpt their own offers and there’s lots of cool ways to do it. (Want to see a great example? Google “Josh Freese”)

People who pledge also receive access to all project updates (posts, video, pics, etc.). “Project Updates” is our fancy name for the project blog. Some project creators may post 10 updates a day, others may rarely post. Some may make all their posts publicly viewable, others may set all their posts as exclusive to their backers.