Poking around in Google maps was proving to be frustrating as it has a preference to focus on ‘places’ that it knows about.

The simplest solution was to create a url in the form

maps.google.com/?q=[your location here]

You just replace [your location here] with your search or location string. For example:

• By place name: http://maps.google.com/?q=Australian National Botanic Gardens, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia
• By address: http://maps.google.com/?q=224%20Flinders%20Street,%20Melbourne,%20Victoria,%20Australia

This allows you to very quickly create individual links for many locations on a page based purely on the address they supplied.

Extremely useful if you want to link to maps of many businesses or organisations in a long list. Quick and easy!

This is just my view on things, and I suspect I’m not the only one that thinks this way, but I should be free to choose whatever strength password I want. I am constantly frustrated by sites that force me to have a password of a given complexity. The example I came across this afternoon that fired me up enough to blog about it was the Australian Government’s GovDex (https://www.govdex.gov.au).

Your pasword on their site:

• Must not be the same as your current password
• Minimum length of 7 characters
• Contain at least one uppercase character
• Contain at least one numeric character

Now I would be ok if they made this as a suggestion. I may have also been OK with this is only one of them were required. But they are all required, and that makes it really annoying for me to pick a password. Shouldn’t I be the one to decide how secure I want my account to be? If I choose a simple password, surely that’s my perogative based on my interpretation of how importantly I need to protect my account?

Stepping back from the personal hardship here, doesn’t a restrictive list of criteria like this actually make a hackers job easier?

By taking these three required criteria:

• Minimum length of 7 characters
• Contain at least one uppercase character
• Contain at least one numeric character

My password bot now has a set of rules that will make it more efficient at finding a valid password by brute force. I can skip all alphanumeric combinations 6 characters or less and I can set rules to always include at least one uppercase and one numeric character.

I may be completely wrong about the hacking thing though – I’m definitely not a hacker and have never made a bot more complex than an auto-reply for IRC.

However, on the real-side of password seurity, because I have to think up such an obscure password, I’m probably not going to remember it which means I’ll just end up either writing it down somewhere, or my preferred option – just resetting my password every time I need to access a site. ;)

Regardless of how I end up managing these sites, one thing would make them better – let me decide on my password policy. It’s my stuff, my information and my reputation on the line if someone hacks my account. Let me choose my own destiny.

This was looking fine until I tried to apply a background colour to the whole table. Applying normal CSS logic, I should be able to apply a class to the table and have everything in it inherit the background colour:

table {background-color: #9f3;}

But this did not work how I had expected it to at all. In Firefox, Chrome and Safari, only the table rows had the background colour applied and the caption text sat above it all in it’s own white box.

Applying a background color to the caption tag should fix the problem, right?

caption {background-color: #9f3;}

Nope. It added the background colour to the caption tag alright, and looked OK in Firefox, but Chrome and Safari have added a gap between the caption and the table rows. Inspecting the element yielded few clues as to where it was coming from because margin-bottom was 0, and there was no margin on the table rows.

Then I found it:
User agent stylesheet
caption {
display: table-caption;
text-align: webkit center;
}

display: table-caption? wtf? Why does this exist and why is it secretly applying so many visual styles on my content?

The Fix

The fix however was simple. Just make it display like a common html element:
caption{display: block;}

And all my problems were gone! Hope this helps someone else!

After a quick search through Google I managed to find this neat if slightly hacky solution on JQuery HowTo:

// Reload mypage.html every 5 seconds
var refresh = setInterval(function()
{
    $('#mydiv').load("mypage.htm?" + 1*new Date() );
}, 5000);

This simple solution tricks the browser in to thinking it is pulling a unique file each time by adding a query string to the end of the uri. The query string won’t have any adverse affect on my code or the data being pulled in – all in all a very neat solution to an awkward problem!

You can read the full article over here -> http://jquery-howto.blogspot.com/2009/04/jquery-ajax-functions-load-get-etc-are.html

To start with, always start with an interval ID. This is just a variable that you create to hold a number that references the current setInterval occurrance (wanted a better word, but that will do). By doing this it is much easier to turn it off when you no longer need it.

Once we have that variable, we go ahead and clear the interval. I know it seem counter-intuitive, but over time I’ve found that by clearing it first, you are guaranteed not to end up with multiple instances of the same setInterval messing everything up on you. So here we go:

var newInt:Number;
clearInterval(newInt);
newInt = setInterval(ding, 1000, “ding”);

So all we have here is a setInterval command, ready to fire off a function called ding every second (remember that setInterval works in milliseconds and there are 1000 milliseconds to a second) sending the parameter of “ding”. So lets add in the function:

var newInt:Number;
clearInterval(newInt);
newInt = setInterval(ding, 1000, “ding”);

function ding(txt:String):void{
    trace(txt);
}

This is now in a position where you can go ahead and try it out so press CTRL-Enter and preview it. If all goes to plan your output will trace “ding” once every second.

To test things out a bit more, let’s introduce a second setInterval command to complicate it all and fire off the original setInterval at random times. The code will look like this:

var newInt:Number;
var secondInt:Number;
var count:Number = 0;

function init(){
   secondInt = setInterval(startInterval, 1000);
}

function startInterval(){
   count++;
   clearInterval(newInt);
   newInt = setInterval(ding, 500, “ding – ” + count);
}

function ding(txt:String){
    trace(txt);
}

init();

So what this is going to do is fire off startInterval every second which will then fire our ding function half a second after that. Because the clearInterval(newInt) is called before the next setInterval is set, everything happens once, then ends. I added in the count to make this easier to notice.

Experiment with this until you have it all figured out. Try commenting out the clearInterval(newInt); line and see what happens:

var newInt:Number;
var secondInt:Number;
var count:Number = 0;

function init(){
   secondInt = setInterval(startInterval, 1000);
}

function startInterval(){
   count++;
   //clearInterval(newInt);                                 
   newInt = setInterval(ding, 500, “ding – ” + count);
}

function ding(txt:String){
    trace(txt);
}

init();

You’ll see now that each iteration of the newInt setInterval keeps going, repeating itself every half a second with nothing to stop it. As far as I can tell there’s also no way of rescuing setIntervals that are launched without a suitable ID.

So the basic rules of setInterval are:

• Always use clearInterval before a setInterval;
• Always use an interval ID;
• Use a unique interval ID for each setInterval you need.

I had been having these thoughts for a while now, but after seeing this clip, I am pretty confident that my statement is accurate.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJHYqE0RDg]

“The best applications aren’t here yet. They’re going to be developed by developers like you…”

Sure, right now we are talking about a platform that isn’t very old and has a lot of growing to do. This video in particular was advertising the prize they’re offering to clever little developers who do code up the applications that will define what the Android platform becomes. But at the crux of it all, your average punter doesn’t understand open source, or care about the possibilities of a completely open architecture. They just want a phone that’s easy to use and works.

The iPhone has enjoyed incredible success, mainly beause it was designed from the beginning to do specific things, but do them in a way that was very intuitive and worked in a way that simply made sense. Having just a few buttons on the device increased the level of simplicity to a level that most people were comfortable with.

Android however isn’t designed for a single piece of hardware. Already there are at least five devices I can think of that have been built to support the platform and from what I can tell, they all behave differently. Some have iPhone-esque touch screens, others prefer to go with more of a Blackberry nub and miscellaneous navigation buttons. Some also go for the full qwerty keypads.

As a website designer and someone that’s had a shot at designing websites for mobiles, I know how difficult it is to try and code for half a dozen different browsers. Multiply that by 30 different screen resolutions. Multiply that by 1000 different input interfaces and you can see just how problematic Android could become.

How do you design something for a device that may or may not have the button or interface you need for your application to work? Even when trying to figure out how much screen real-astate you have and how big or small the text needs to be becomes a massive problem.

Then there’s the rest of the world who can and probably will end up saying “90% of my clients use iPhones, Blackberry’s and Windows Mobile – I’ll code for those. If users are smart enough to know how to use Android, they’ll be smart enough to figure out how to use my application or view my website.”

Which is very similar to Linux. No-one want to do expensive user-testing, research and evaluation and devote weeks of development time on a platform only 3% of their market uses, so they remain unsupported. While they remain unsupported, there won’t be any consumer confidence in it. While there is no confidence, there will be no sales and without sales, they remain unsupported.

I don’t know what it will take to make Android a success. It could be a single device that will rule them all, it might be an application that simply revolutionises the way we use our phones, or it might just never work at all.

What I will go on the record as saying however is that in its current form, with its variety of devices and at least from my perspective no solid drive towards perfecting the user experience, its just not going to cut it.

So I went out looking at the Federal Government initiatives for solar panels. Now I know solar panels aren’t the greatest when it comes to their carbon footprint. I believe the quote goes something like “they’ll never create enough energy to replace the energy that went in to manufacturing them in the first place” but at the same time, they are helping and heck I think it’d be kinda cool.

So off I went searching for details on these rebates and the first thing that jammed in to my eye is the key eligibility criteria: you must earn less than $100,000 in your household.

OK – huh?

In Australia we currently have an insane housing market with a standard home costing $300,000 – 400,000. In order to get a home loan, you either need to have a pretty well paying job, or a couple of them, or have your nana drop dead and leave you a small fortune.

So you’ve saved and worked hard and you’ve finally bought your house. All your money is being poured in to the mortgage and you might have enough left over to eat, maybe even buy yourself some new pants.

Then the next question I have to ask is if you have managed to earn less than $100,000 a year, buy yourself a house and still manage to live, how are you going to able to afford to buy any solar panels? I mean, it’s only a rebate – you’ve still got to foot the bill yourself to start with.

What this has led me to though, is a money making scheme. Mobile homes. Caravans. Tents and shantys. These guys are all probably earning less than $100,000 a year, and using very little power. If you were to wander the alleys of your local caravan park and loan people the money to buy their own solar panels, even letting them keep the rebate for themselves, then signing them up to a contract whereby all revenue from the panels gets paid to you. They get free power and because so much excess power would be fed back in to the grid, you could make a fortune!

If anyone goes out and tried this idea, send me 5%. If you work in government on the solar panel rebate – please get them to reconsider the amount for the means test.

My only comment is – so what?

A teeny little cosmetic crack is not going to destroy your phone, it’s not even going to affect the performance one smidge.

It’s not the first time that this has happened though – cast your mind back to the dark ages of the year 2000 and you’ll recall that Apple went through similar dramas with their G4 cube.

The spunky, 8″ ‘toaster’that performed at a similar speed to it’s much larger desktop tower brother, but a heck of a lot smaller and a lot sexier suffered a very short life due in part to its cost, and also because of similar hairline cracks that appeared in its seamless case.

For the most part however, these cracks are miniscule. The main comment on the cube’s cracks, is equally relevant for the iPhone -

“None of these appearance flaws are serious — they aren’t visible from across a desk…”
Joel Sparks,originalcopy.com

 Have a look at most of the cracks on these phones and you’ll notice that they are really, really small. I believe the reason no-one has found them on the black ones is because they’re simply too hard to spot.

But why am I so nonchalant about these cracks? Because quite simply it really doesn’t matter. Within a few weeks of having your shiny new iPhone, you will get sick of the silicone sleeve or executive kangaroo leather pouch you sprung $120 for and you’ll start using your iPhone ‘raw’.

Whether its when you’re in a hurry to get to a meeting or a late night stumble on your way home from the pub, you will drop your phone. Once you do that, you are going to have much bigger problems than a hairline crack. You’ll have full-blown scars.

Real equipment has scars. If you don’t scuff it up in the first 6 months of owning it, you’re not using it properly.

So stop your whinging, be glad that you are lucky enough to have an iPhone and just start using it. It is still a kick-ass device.

1. It is a mac only app for the moment. Either go borrow your mates computer for an afternoon or slip in to an Apple store and use one of theirs!
2. No Installer support
3. It won’t unlock a 3G iPhone

At the moment, installing the 2.0 firmware on your 1st gen iPhone will not give you support for our very loved old friend, Installer. It does however give us access to Apple’s shiny AppStore which has newer versions of most of the gadgets we know and love.

I found my copy of the Pwnage tool as a torrent, but I’m sure hundreds of people have mirrored it over the web by now. You really shouldn’t have any trouble finding it. The supporting files you also need to grab are pretty easy to find too. I simply let iTunes download the freaking mammoth 220MB iPhone 2.0 firmware ipsw file, and found the other parts using the Google-searches built in to the application.

Once everything was together I fired up Pwnage and tried to get it all working. It found the ipsw OK, found the other required files and compiled the new ipsw without any hassles. When it came to loading it all on to the iPhone however, it all fell apart.

The error that everyone has been googling since the tool was released: “Failed to enter DFU mode”

The fix for this was difficult to find. There are hundreds of posts out there from people trying to find answers, but very few useful solutions. However, the solution is a simple one:

Fire up Terminal on your Mac and fire of these two commands:

cd ~/Library/iTunes
mkdir “Device Support”

No idea why creating a directory fixes the problem, but it does. Now off you go, go grab some shiny new apps from the AppStore!!

Thanks to Joe Shaw for the answer – I’m sure his ISP is having a fit right about now… linky.