St. Louis Coalition for Life Launched 11/11/11
Last night I was in attendance at 40 Days for Life St. Louis ' Benefit dinner, and was happy to hear about a new initiative, the St. Louis Coalition for Life , to help put an end abortion in St. Louis (and Missouri!), and to raise awareness about other life issues.
Removed Leaderboard Ads over Articles
Over the past 10 years, I've tried many different ways of monetizing this website; I've run Google Ads (using AdSense), adding tip jars (accepting donations through PayPal), and adding particular ads and revenue-generating links (like affiliate links).
The most annoying monetization is always a glaring, leaderboard or sidebar (or even worse, in-content) ad. Therefore I've decided to simply remove all leaderboard ads on this site; the only places where you'll
Drupal 6.x and PHP 5.3.x - Date Timezone warnings
This morning, I was presented with quite the conundrum: one of my servers suddently started having about 4x the normal MySQL traffic it would have in a morning, and I had no indication as to why this was happening; traffic to the sites on the server was steady (no spikes), and I couldn't find any problems with any of the sites.
However, after inspecting the Apache (httpd) error logs for the Drupal 6 sites, I found a ton of PHP warnings on almost all the
Problems copying a huge Aperture library from one drive to another
I've often had trouble copying files with Mac OS X's Finder. From back in the Mac OS X Beta days (when it was based on NeXT's UI), hard drive to hard drive copies, network copies, and backups have often had strange quirks, and one of the strangest I've yet found happened yesterday when I tried copying a ~170GB Aperture library from one external USB drive to another.
I tried copying the library three times, and each time the copy
Rooting Android - General Observations and OG Droid + LG Ally
Background and Comparison to iOS Jailbreaking
After a couple years having had no experience with an Android phone of any variety, a generous Twitter follower I had met donated two older Android phones, an original Motorola Droid (running Froyo 2.2.2) and an LG Ally (also running 2.2.2), so I could learn the Android UI and work on porting a couple of my iOS apps.
One unfortunate reality of the Android ecosystem is that phones are often abandoned by their manufacturers after only a year
Preventing Form Spam
A Constant User-Experience Battle
Usually, the first thing someone will do after having trouble fighting spammers by manual comment/content moderation is place a complex CAPTCHA system on their forms. Something like this:
Configure sendmail on CentOS to allow sending of email from localhost
For some of my Drupal sites and PHP scripts (and shell scripts) that I run on a VPS I manage, I need to simply be able to send outgoing emails from arbitrary email addresses. I could go into all the details of DNS SPF records and MX records here, but that's something you'll need to research on your own. This post simply shows how to install and configure sendmail on a CentOS box to just allow outgoing mail from php's mail() function, the mail command
St. Louis-area Catholic Bloggers / Websites
Mostly for my own reference... but I'm sure some other people may find this useful as well! Below are listed all the St. Louis-area Catholic blogs and websites that I know of (major organizational sites excluded, because those are pretty obvious):
| Name | Author(s)/Contributor(s) | Laity/Clergy/Cons. |
| Life is a Prayer.com Blog | Jeff Geerling | laity |
| Rome of the West | Mark Scott Abeln | laity |
| Saint Louis Catholic | thetimman | laity |
| Snup's View from the Back |
Catholic Apps make faith aids mobile
I'd be remiss to not mention a very well-written article in the Denver Catholic Register by Julie Filby: Catholic apps make faith aids mobile .
In the article, Julie does a great job explaining apps and their growing prominence in the lives of the faithful, along with some tips from Mark Hart and I:
Todayâs technology offers Catholics many tools for praying, communicating and learning about their faith. One such tool comes in the form of âapps.â [.
Problems with Android's Back Button
Android's back button is a problem. A big problem.
Others have already identified this in a broad sense, but I wanted to give a few concrete examples of why I (as a guy who wants to simply port a couple apps from the iOS platform to Android) think the back button (especially) is a bad idea.
Disorientation
Mobile phones, and tablets especially, require a lot of UX work in the area of interface orientation. For my extremely-basic CNL app, I've spent hours
