Adam's Blog

I watch a few TV shows that are in desperate need of a kick in the ass. Let's review: Heroes has, for some time now, sucked. Long ago, the writers decided to give up on character consistency, and they decided that they would have the characters stop on a dime and act completely contrary to their previous actions. Case in point: Nathan, who quickly turned on his fellow mutants and now wants Peter dead, apparently. I can't even get into Heroes other than to say it's such a mess it really should be canceled altogether. Kyle XY is a show I started watching when I was a sick a few years ago, and I kept on for the mystery. The problem is: the writers revealed too much too soon, and when the basic mysteries were solved, the second season introduced a worthless character, Jesse XX, as a plot device. Then the plot become bigger as they introduced "Adam Baylin", and explained a backstory to Zzyzx. When that concluded, we learned that Madacorp was behind it all. When that was done, we learned that it was actually "Latnok" was behind it all. In other words, the lazy writers just keep making...

I was stuck in pretty terrible traffic last night, as a result, the 5 mile commute home took well over an hour forty five, during which time, I had to entertain a 15 month old. To pass the time, my daughter and I conducted an experiment: to find out which of the 16 fart noises that come in the iPhone's "Fart for Free" application is funniest. Fart for Free I can now report the results. I find fart #6 to be funniest. Each time I listen to it, I continue to laugh, unlike some of the others, which are funny the first time but no longer surprising or funny thereafter. 1 is good, a simple pop, but 6 continues to make everyone laugh. But the science part of it is thus: will a 15 month old, who doesn't speak any real English, whose comprehension is limited to just a few short syllables, find any fart funny at all? The answer is an enthusiastic yes! Jillian found fart #13 to the funniest, if her reaction is to be believed. She did not laugh at all at fart #1, however, she gave a good smile for #6. She cried during farts 10...

One of my favorite South Park clips.

Matt Mullenweg, creator of Wordpress and skipper of Automattic, has declared today, January 28, "Thank a Plugin Developer" Day. In thanks, I will list all of the plugins I use in my sethadam1.com Wordpress install. Akismet is a comment filter that uses a "karma" type algorithm to analyze comments and separate ham from spam. According to my internal stats, Akismet reports 37,512 spams caught, 284 legitimate comments, and an overall accuracy rate of 99.934%. Not too shabby. As a result, this site no longer has a captcha. Blip.It iPhone Handler is a neat little tool that creates a method to display embedded flash as Quicktime on-the-fly, ideal for iPhone compatibility. Cache Images, another Mullenweg gem, let me fetch remote images and store them locally. I prefer to host all images locally if possible, so this is fantastic. "ftBlogrollerWP (ft)" is my own modified plugin that creates a page with all of my links, as seen here. Google XML Sitemaps is a tool for creating a sitemap that Google and other search engines can use to spider your site. This would take forever by hand and would be very hard to keep up manually, but this plugin makes it effortless. Limit...

I wish people like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Joe the Plumber, and Sarah Palin much success. They are the best thing to happen to the Democratic party.

Every so often I find myself with a multidimensional array that I want to sort by a value in a sub-array. I have an array that might look like this: //an array of some songs I like $songs = array( '1' => array('artist'=>'The Smashing Pumpkins', 'songname'=>'Soma'), '2' => array('artist'=>'The Decemberists', 'songname'=>'The Island'), '3' => array('artist'=>'Fleetwood Mac', 'songname' =>'Second-hand News') ); The problem is thus: I'd like to echo out the songs I like in the format "Songname (Artist)," and I'd like to do it alphabetically by artist. PHP provides many functions for sorting arrays, but none will work here. ksort() will allow me to sort by key, but the keys in the $songs array are irrelevant. asort() allows me to sort and preserves keys, but it will sort $songs by the value of each element, which is also useless, since the value of each is "array()". usort() is another possible candidate and can do multi-dimensional sorting, but it involves building a callback function and is often pretty long-winded. Even the examples in the PHP docs references specific keys. So I developed a quick function to sort by the value of a key in a sub-array. Please note this version does...

I haven't heard much about what to expect in iPhone OS 2.3. A quick Googling of the term, as of today, yields nothing of value, other than speculation. iPhone 2.2 came out in November, almost 2 months ago. Since we haven't heard anything about 2.3, that leaves just a few possibilities. First, it's possible that Apple simply stopped development on the iPhone. I think the likelihood of this is practically null. The other possibility is that Apple has been working on things, but nothing is ready. In two months, we haven't heard anything at all - there's been no SDK update, no betas. That means either they are working slowly, or they are working on things that are taking some time. Rewind to iPhone OS 2.0. There was supposed to be a "push" mechanism by which applications would report to Apple, and a single iPhone tether to Apple would act as the pusher for all background services. That was delayed until "October" timeframe, and has since been ignored. Or has it? My prediction: the next version of the iPhone OS to see light of day will be iPhone OS 3.0. It will feature background notifications via Apple's push services (which...