Shafted In Florida: How AT&T Ruined My Vacation

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Currently taking a short break from the winter cold, in Florida. Usually, my parents would be down here, and we would join them; but they had to remain in Toronto due to medical treatments. So we ended up opening the house.

My mother called AT&T ahead of our trip, and asked them to have the phone and Internet ready for the day of our arrival. And they promptly ignored her request. Upon our arrival, no phone, no Internet. Continue reading →

A Sunday

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Lovely day today. Yvonne was off work, so we thought we might spend the day together. What a novel idea!

We were thinking of going to the Toronto International Art Fair, but our friends Hugh and Diane warned us it was lame. They instead recommended the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition at Nathan Philips Square, in the summer. I’d actually stumbled into it many years ago, and it was inspiring. Kinda missed it this year. We’ll gear up for the next one July 9-11, 2010. (Pluswhich, the TIAF is $18 to get in, whereas the outdoor one is FREE!)

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So we decided to have lunch at Caplansky’s, then head out to the Distillery District to finally check it out. (We’ve been promising ourselves to go visit for a couple of years now.)
Continue reading →

One Web Day 2009

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This year I participated in One Web Day. OWD promotes Web issues to the public. It celebrates that every participant to the web is also a contributor.

As part of Tucows’ support and involvement, we collected over 10GB of public domain and Creative Commons ebooks. These will be loaded onto computers we donated to the Little Geeks Foundation, and sent to Northern communities.

Andy Walker, who started Little Geeks, and happens to be my boss, tells us these communities are rife with social problems, resulting in high rates of teen suicide. The last time books were sent there, the suicide rate dropped by 50%. So I’m hoping our efforts here will have a real, positive and lasting effect on these peoples’ lives.

Mozilla also supported One Web Day 2009. In fact, it capped off their Web Service Week; which is like seven days of One Web Day.

They had these cool OWD posters you could print, have your picture taken with, and uploaded it to flickr.

Finally, we had a terrific soiree at Cafe Taste, around the corner from Tucows HQ, sponsored by Tucows, Mozilla and WikiDomo.

If you missed One Web Day, don’t fret: it’s an annual thing. This was the 3rd, and only my first. Keep an eye on the OWD site. I expect I’ll also say something about it here, before the 2010 event. Until then, be good to our web: create some content.

Starting XAMPP Automatically Upon Login on OSX

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I was SO getting tired of opening a terminal window to get my web server going when I needed to do some web dev on my MacBook Pro, I finally started looking around for ways to start XAMPP on it’s own when I booted my machine.

I found the answer deep in the forums. It looks like this:

crontab -u root -e
@reboot /Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/mampp start

I didn’t know you could do an @reboot in crontab. It turns out there are a number of these abbreviations, including @hourly, @monthly, @yearly.

Anyhow, it seems to be working, and I’m delighted.

Sitepoint Gives Away Free Book on Building Firefox Extensions

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Regular readers of this blog will know I’m a huge fan of Firefox (the ultimate browser for developing web apps) and Sitepoint (a set of wonderful resources for web developers and designers).

What makes Firefox the best tool for web developers (and others)? It’s the extensions. And now, for a limited time, Sitepoint is offering a middlingly useful extension, CodeBurner for Firefox, which gives you access to their wealth of HTML and CSS reference material, right from your browser. This used to be an addon to the awesome Firebug extension, but now is stand-alone.

To celebrate the release of this new version of CodeBurner, Sitepoint are giving away a PDF book on developing Firefox extensions. This is supposed to be a limited time offer (30 days) so hurry up! (On the other hand, once you give away a PDF for free, it’s kinda hard to start charging for it.)

Sitepoint has a tremendous library of books for sale, and they’ve really hit a sweet spot in the market: I’ve purchased nearly every title they’ve ever published. Their books are well written, professionally edited and delivered in a timely fashion. Their customer service is also beyond reproach. I once complained a book had arrived slightly damaged, and received another copy a few days later. Top notch.

OK, gotta go now. I’m keen to get into developing my own FF extension!

Open Source HTML/CSS to PDF

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I spent most of last night viddying Google Tech Talk videos on YouTube. They’ve got terrific stuff there. Too bad about the res.

One of the videos was about , a commercial product which takes HTML/CSS and converts it to a paginated PDF, suitable for printing in book format. (Yes, a dead tree type book.)

Awesome. Except for the price.

Too bad, too, because I could really use something like this. A couple of years ago I did a project for a company called CityFax, in which we had to produce, and email out documents in PDF format. We used a very serviceable PHP library to generate the PDF pages; but it was grueling work putting them together. Why learn a new language if you can do the same thing with the tools you already use every day? (i.e. HTML and CSS)

So I went in search of an open source version of this tool. And sho’nuff my brothers, it’s out there. XHTML2PDF, is an open source, dual license project which produces PDF’s for a living. It’s written in Python, but has command line versions for OS X, Linux and Windows.

Next time I need to generate a PDF, this is my go-to tool.