Steven Osborn
"I would love to change the world, but they won't give me the source code".

Archive for the ‘Programming’ Category

Distributed Versioning - The new wheel

Friday, February 15th, 2008

With all of the great distributed versioning tools out there it's a wonder everyone is still using traditional client-server versioning systems like SVN or CVS. Especially when you consider how trivial distributed systems are to setup for small projects. Unless your hosting your SVN project with some one ...

Framework Envy

Sunday, February 3rd, 2008

I'm typically a PHP guy. I wrote my first web page using PHP3 and have created some pretty robust websites since then and for the most part it's been a pleasure to work with. I also have a bit of experience using Zend Framework which among other things has ...

Using JanRain OpenID with Zend Framework

Monday, January 28th, 2008

Ok, I know Zend_OpenId is on the way, but for those of us who don't like to wait here's a way to get OpenID working with Zend Framework. Besides, JanRain's libraries tend to be pretty solid and up to date so you won't go wrong using this in place ...

What everyone’s Zend_View_Helper tutorials leave out.

Sunday, January 27th, 2008

There seems to be several Zend_View_Helper tutorials out there and all of them talk about what a view helper is and does, but I always left with one question: How do I make the helpers available to ALL of my views? Then I learned a bit about Zend_Controller_Action_HelperBroker This class can ...

Wacky bugs

Tuesday, December 18th, 2007

Mac User's BEWARE: This one is probably one of the nastiest bugs I've seen in a while: http://www.tuaw.com/2007/12/16/quickbooks-users-be-cautious-of-recent-update/ I know someone personally who was bitten by this one. Upgrading Quickbooks will actually delete your entire Desktop folder and all of it's contents. There are a couple of suggested work-arounds ...

Android: Simple Tabs Example

Wednesday, November 28th, 2007

It seems google may have shipped android with a tab widget that is said to be deprecated from the time of release. Here is a simple method I've used to implement tab-like functionality that seems to work well for me. You can easily change the background of the ...

Accessing Android Resources By Name at Runtime

Tuesday, November 27th, 2007

Here's a little snippet I wrote to access resources in R.java during runtime. It just uses reflection to get the filed names of the objects in the R class. public class RR { public static Drawable getDrawable(Context context, String name) { ...

Google Hax0rs

Sunday, November 25th, 2007

I noticed this interesting entry in my server's access log today. I certainly have phpMyAdmin running at that location, but you can't get the process list unless you login. 66.249.70.89 xxxxxxxxx.com - [21/Nov/2007:13:43:18 -0800] "GET /MyAdmin/server_processlist.php?lang=en-utf-8&convcharset=iso-8859-1&collation_connection=utf8_unicode_ci&token=a1bb5490499a10bb493edc160625e33b&kill=49481 HTTP/1.1" 404 345 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" You can do two things at ...

Android Iconified List

Wednesday, November 21st, 2007

I've had a lot of fun hacking on Android applications recently and I'm really looking forward to seeing the future of Android unfold. My first project was the the password safe I mentioned in my last post and while working on some features for it I was looking for an ...

Android Password Safe

Tuesday, November 20th, 2007

I've got my first working Android application together. It's just a simple password safe with some decent features for a first release including: 128 Bit AES Encryption Password protected. Your password is needed to decrypt the data stored in the safe All data is entrypted including notes, website link, description Click through ...