It goes without saying that I love my iPhone. I can geek out on just about any Apple device but the iPhone trumps them all. Yes, when I first heard the rumors circulating early last year that an Apple cell phone was in the works, I dismissed and denied them. “Impossible. That sounds totally stupid and Apple would never do something that totally stupid.” Of course, not only was I staggeringly wrong in my assumptions about the device, but by the end of the keynote I was already coveting one.

Fast forward to March of this year. Although no official word had yet come out that a 3G iPhone was on the way, it was fairly obvious. Nonetheless, the time was right, and I had to move on it, so I bought an iPhone while my window of opportunity was open. I certainly haven’t regretted it, and I admit I’m pleased that the 3G isn’t a revolutionary leap forward. That its most interesting feature — the new software — is fully compatible with the old iPhone means that not only did I not regret not getting a new iPhone this past weekend, it meant that in some sense I did get a new iPhone this past weekend. And it’s what I was waiting for since March.

But, sadly, the most peculiar flaw in the iPhone’s software, for me anyway, endures. Read more »

Even if you’re not familiar with the contrived acronym CAPTCHA, you’ve probably encountered the concept from time to time online. It’s a reasonably reliable way for websites that allow user comments to distinguish a human from a spambot, and thus it’s one form of Turing test. So far so good. In fact I use one such CAPTCHA service, reCAPTCHA, for comments on this site.

I like reCAPTCHA because, aside from the fact that it works (most of the time, though you may guess that one of its failings has prompted this posting, and you may be correct), it is part of a Carnegie Mellon University project to digitize books. (You see, humans completing the CAPTCHAs help to decipher words that the OCR software chokes on.)

Tonight I was going over various pages of my site, attempting to apply yet another layer of polish to everything, and I discovered the most bizarre abomination of a CAPTCHA I have ever seen. I grabbed a screenshot, and here it is. Good luck with that.

Harken back to the days of yore, when we all kept our NCSA Mosaic “hotlists” up to date with our latest favorite links. Come to think of it, a blogroll (a term that is quickly becoming just as antiquated) is no different. But since I generally keep my sidebar link lists (a.k.a. the “blogroll”) limited to top-level pages of sites in which I have a broad interest, but these items are specific sub-pages or blog posts, I am just going to list them out here for my own future reference, and yours.

First up we have a cool coffee mug for type aficionados, and it even ties in with the excellent Helvetica documentary.

Next, some Useful WordPress Tricks… the title says it all.

And then we have… well, actually that’s all we have for right now, but if I think of, or stumble upon, anything else pertinent and/or interesting before the stroke of midnight, I’ll just add it here.

I was beyond dismayed tonight to load up my browser and discover that my website, for whatever reason, just wasn’t working. Firefox would just bring up a completely blank screen. Safari returned a strange error:

Safari can’t open the page “http://room34.com/”. The error was: “Operation could not be completed. (kCFErrorDomainCFNetwork error 302.)” (kCFErrorDomainCFNetwork:302) Please choose Report Bugs to Apple from the Safari menu, note the error number, and describe what you did before you saw this message.

Uhh… OK.

Needless to say, it’s not something I’ve ever seen before, and if Google is any indication, (almost) no one else has either.

After inspecting my files and my data tables to see if anything had been altered (i.e. hacked — and no, it hadn’t), and watching The Colbert Report, I decided I had no choice but to confront the rat king and start stepping through all of the nested include files that comprise the WordPress application, hoping to find the exact point at which the whole thing was going kerblooey. Read more »

Not to be confused with stinky feet, sticky footers are a CSS technique whereby a page footer always appears at the bottom of the page/window, even if the content of the page isn’t tall enough to fill the window completely. (For you HTML-phobes out there, normally all of the content on a web page flows vertically one element after another, meaning that your page “footer” can potentially end up in the middle of the window, with a bunch of blank space below it, if your page content is too short. Not to be confused with Too Short.)

I have seen sites whose owners had solved this problem, but as it’s never really been an issue for me (since I never have too little content to fill a page, I guess!), I haven’t bothered to dig into the solution, until today, when I needed to for work.

The Man in Blue (also known as Australian author and self-identified “web technologist” Cameron Adams), has posted an elegant solution, which has also been floating around in various forums. Read more »