For several years, I've been using pretty-cheap web hosting services for my blog, my corporate website, and other webby things. However, I'm pretty sure that it would be even cheaper to use Amazon EC2, especially as they now offer free usage for a year. I also like the ease with …
Find-My-iPhone Success Story
My wife, stepson, and I carpooled today. I picked them up at school and we made the 45-minute drive back home. As we parked the car, my wife noticed that she didn't have her iPhone.
She initially thought she had left it back in the teachers' lounge, so she called …
PowerShell and Unicode
After being away from the Windows developer world for a few years, I have been pleased to find some of the nice things that Microsoft has given us. Visual Studio has some really nice refactoring capabilities. The Windows 7 user experience rivals OS X. And as an alternative to the …
Workflow for Remote CVS, Local Git
One of my clients uses a CVS repository for all its source code. People recognize that there are better options available than CVS, but it's been cranking along fine for 15 years, and they see no compelling reason to change.
However, I really like being able to commit incremental changes …
Core Animation Performance Tips
In my copious free time, I've been working on a videogame for the iPad. Friends and family may interject here that it seems like I'm always working on a videogame in my free time, but I've never actually finished one. This time is different. Really.
All of my personal projects …
My iPad Review
So, I've had an iPad for about a month and a half. Here are my impressions:
Overall, it's really nice. It fills the need for a little Internet-connected device that lets me watch video, read books, read online news, and browse the web. I used to keep my old 13-inch …
Looking for iPad Application Beta Testers
Some time in the next few weeks, I hope to have an iPad game ready for submission to the App Store. I am looking for people to help me test the app.
You need to have the following:
- An iPad
- Somebody with whom to play the game (it's a two-player …
Internet Emergency Checklist
When the power goes out, nobody asks me how to make it work again. But if the Internet goes down for three seconds, everyone in the house is yelling at me, telling me I need to MAKE IT WORK! NOW!
Most Internet problems are due to issues that have nothing …
New Job, Old Job
For the last seven years, I've been working with a company that does gaming-related stuff (lotteries, casinos, race tracks). I worked for a few years as an employee, and later as a contractor. Like all jobs, it's had its ups and downs, but on the whole it was a good …
Shiny iPhone Buttons Without Photoshop
Newcomers to iPhone development are sometimes surprised at how ugly the standard button controls are. They quickly learn that they need a graphic artist to create a nice-looking button image in Photoshop and then attach that to the buttons. However, in this tutorial, I'll show how to create nice shiny …