Navigate Yahoo! Search Results Using Only Your Keyboard

Google has an experimental search page where you can test drive new search result layouts. My favorite is the Keyboard Shortcuts option. This lets you navigate and view search resultsusing only the keyboard – no mouse required! It’s a huge benefit for Quicksilver fans. Now that Yahoo! is my default search engine, I desperately didn’t … Read more

Retain Your Employees With Your Ideals, Not Your Perks

Earlier today I was asked what I look for in a job. Specifically, what it would take to retain me past the typical “three year burnout” period tech workers often find themselves up against. The usual answers came to mind: a fun corporate environment, challenging assignments, working with people smarter than myself. Those are all … Read more

50 States Programming Puzzle

Anders Pearson posted an interesting programming puzzle today on Thraxil.org: Take the names of two U.S. States, mix them all together, then rearrange the letters to form the names of two other U.S. States. What states are these? He found out about it from Mark Nelson who, in turn, heard it on NPR. It’s not … Read more

How to Enable PHP5 In Mac OS X Leopard

I’ve seen a lot of visitors searching for information on enabling PHP5 in Mac OS X Leopard. It turns out to be quite easy. Leopard ships with Apache 2 and PHP 5 pre-installed. To enable PHP simply: That’s it! PS – If you want any easy way to setup and manage virtual hosts on your … Read more

My Favorite New Leopard Feature

Select a file in Finder and press ↩ to rename it. Finder now excludes the file extension from the initial text selection. This leaves you free to type a new name without overwriting over the extension.

Leopard First Impressions

If you squint your eyes and look to the side of your monitor, Leopard is actually quite attractive.

What is Twitter?

Nat from O’Reilly Radar: It reminded me of the time in my mis-spent youth when I got lost in IRC, spending evenings heckling the TV with my IRC friends. This is the geek equivalent of being stoner, by the way, with roughly the same effect on cognition . . . It’s a very loosely-coupled conversation. … Read more

foo9 URL Shortener

I was out of town for a couple days last week and had a lot of time to kill at my hotel. Needing something to do I decided to write my own URL shortening service. This is hardly an original idea – TinyURL.com has been around for a long time. Newcomer url(x) is great, too. … Read more

iPhone Versus Dog

A lesson for all you iPhone owners out there: don’t leave your phone on a table that your dog can reach. I got out of the shower this morning to find my dog, Gracie, gnawing away on my phone in the middle of the living room. I was a little upset, but life goes on. … Read more

Lessons From a First Time Mac Developer

I’m a web developer by trade. I’ve been programming for the web for over tenyears – prior to that I was (god forgive me) a VisualBasic and then .NET developer. Ever since switching to Mac I’ve been interested in building software for OS X. Over the last few years I read up on Cocoa and … Read more