Have iPad will travel, er, I mean develop stuff

At the moment I am on holidays overseas, in southern Germany, visiting the rellies (that's slang for relatives)

Before I left, I was agonizing about whether I should take my Macbook Pro laptop with me, or whether I should 'travel light' and just take my iPad

This blog is the first in a short series of blogs on my experience so far. A summary of the things I have been able to do with just my iPad, and the things I have not been able to do, yet, or have had to do differently

First, I think I should set out the goals I had, a list of the things I had in mind before starting out

1. Reading dev stuff
2. Fixing stuff on our web site
3. Doing web dev tutorial stuff
4. Keeping in touch socially
5. Playing games
6. Listening to audio books
7. Other stuff as needed

So how are things going?

1. Reading dev stuff

*Tick*, no real problems here

This was my most important 'must be able to do' and I already knew I would not have any problems with this one. Its probably the main reason I stopped agonizing and just brought my iPad.

I guess I should have also included the need to download new reading stuff as it is published - like all of the eMagazines I subscribe to. Just about all of them have come out with new issues while I have been away.

The main problem with downloading new stuff is the bandwidth required. It costs 25 Euro for 5 Gb, after that the speed is limited to something a lot lower than the 5-7 Mb/sec I have been getting on O2's 3G network.

I think if I was doing the last few weeks over I just would not download all of the new eMagazine releases, it really chews up the bandwidth quite quickly.

When we landed, I used a 15 Euro, 1 Gb voucher that I had from our last trip here and we went through it quite quickly.

I was not just the eMagazines but I also had to re-sync some audio books (see #6) and the speed was throttled after a few days.

Unfortunately, the stores here are not open Sunday so we had pretty slow Internet access on late Saturday and all through Sunday until I could get to the O2 store in Radolfzell. The pre-paid vouchers cant be bought online for some reason, at least not the 5Gb ones that I wanted.

2. Fixing stuff on our web site

I have not tried this one out yet, a project for later this week or on the weekend?

I bought myself an iPad App called iTeleport to be able to access my home Mac via a sort of VPN/Screen sharing program.

I'll be interested in seeing how it is over the 3G network speeds :)

3. Doing web dev tutorial stuff

Have not done too much of this yet but so far so good.

I bought myself an iPad App called Textastic and it makes it pretty easy to edit web content in HTML 5, CSS and use stuff like Javascript.

I also have an App which connects to a hosted Uniz environment called Linode. I have not tried this out yet but a friend pointed me to a great article on using Linode for iPad based development

See http://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034/swapped-my-macbook-for-an-ipad

4. Keeping in touch socially

*Tick* this one is pretty easy :)

5. Playing games

Playing my iPad games has been no problem, except while the speed was throttled (see #1)

As an experiment, I also bought myself a few new iPad games: Infinity Blade I and II and also Dungeon 2 HD.

Infinity Blade I has been fun, I have not started Infinity Blade II yet, Im just trying to level my gear a bit more and defeat the main baddy again before I move on.

Dungeon 2 HD is a sort of 'Diablo clone' according to the reviews and I bought it mainly because I am into Diablo III at the moment but cant play it while Im away.

More about Dungeon 2 HD and Infinity Blade II next week when I've had a chance to check them out

6. Listening to audio books

This has been a bit of a problem :-/

It seems that my Audible audio books library is 'out of sync' and I could no access audio books I was listening to before I left.

Not sure why but it seems that there is a known bug, solution? - re-sync (read 'download') affected audio books ... this lead to chewing up a lot of bandwidth for the first 1 Gb Internet pack I used when I got here (see #1)

Otherwise, listening is no problem but the lesson is have a backup way of listening to audio books just i case... maybe also load them onto my iPhone or a small iPad

7. Other stuff as needed

The iPad has been perfect for just surfing and email and photos and stuff.

I turned on Photostream to use while Im here, take photos with iPhone while Im out and about and they automatically sync with my iPad when its connected to WiFi.

The only problem, you guessed it, chewing up bandwidth again. Pity there isn't a sync via local WiFi or Bluetooth option when my iPhone and iPad and in range of each other.

As it is, it is all via the Apple iCloud and uses 2 x the size of the content in bandwidth, once up and once down. Lucky I only have 2 devices here using the same bandwidth :)

Well that's part I of this blog. Pretty pedestrian I know but I will try to report some of the more interesting stuff in my next blog.

Signing off, for now :D

The secret of living forever

I think I may have found the secret of living for ever...
The trick is to agree a very long list of things to do with God and then to do things one at a time
Let me take you through the logic... we start with the cartoon below... God put me on this Earth to accomplish a certain number of things... as an aside, this reminds me of that scene from Mash where Charles Emerson Winchester says that he always " I do one thing at a time, I do it very well, and then I move on" ... it seemed to work for Charles and Mash as this was one of the longest running TV series ever!
Then there is the magic of doing one thing at a time
The author claims that by focussing on one thing at a time you feel better, less stress, you are happier, etc
So, combining the two ideas, you can live virtually for ever if you start with a very, very long list (as agreed with God) and then do things one at a time... Simple!



I encourage you to try this, I know I will, I just hope I can negotiate a few more interesting things to do with God ;) ... then I can tell people "I'm on a mission from God" (could not resist that quote from Elroy Blues in The Blues Brothers)

NickyB - Add a splash of colour :)

Check out this great new fashion site

The fashion is young and fresh and is just beautiful!

Its Life Jim, but not as we know it :)

I found this in today's SMH technology section

THE Milky Way is home to tens of billions of rocky planets - including about 100 nearby - that could potentially harbour life, a new study has concluded.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/possible-life-on-100-planets-study-says-20120328-1vytq.html#ixzz1qYhpthlx

HTML 5, CSS 3 and Javascript effects in Safari - a showcase

Check out this showcase on HTML 5, CSS 3 and Javascript effects in Safari.

http://developer.apple.com/safaridemos/

Very nice! This really is the way of future web development...good bye Flash and the like :)

Installing JQuery in a RapidWeaver site

I found this article on installing jQuery in a RapidWeaver site.  It also seems to work just as well for non-RapidWeaver sites.... just ignore the comments re RapidWeaver and insert the suggest code in the header of the page of the site you happen to be working with

http://www.joshlockhart.com/tutorials/how-to-install-jquery-in-a-rapidweaver-theme

Turning PHP on in your Mac Web server

In the previous blog, I introduced you to the built in web server in your Mac's OS X operating system.

I use my personal web server to publish and test web sites I am developing, using my favourite Web development tool RapidWeaver from RealMacSoftware.

Some of the sites I develop need PHP and so in this blog I'm going to tell you how to turn on PHP in your Mac's web server.  It comes pre installed but, by default, PHP is not enabled and you have to 'turn it on' by changing some settings in your Mac's inbuilt Apache web server.

You'll need a special editor for this job, something like TextMate (from Macromates.com) or Text Wrangler (from Bare Bones software).  I have both tools on my Mac but for this blog I'm going to use Text Mate.

Some of the files you need to modify for a job like this are hidden or system files and these two tools have the ability to access files like that and help you change them (using the appropriate system permissions).

Fire up Text Mate and click File > Open   Make sure the 'Show Hidden Files' option is selected and navigate your way to [YourHardDrive]:private:etc:apache2:httpd.conf

You will probably need to supply the name/password of the root user or a super user on your system to edit and change the file so be prepared and supply it when requested.

Find the line in the file like this...
#LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

and remove the '#' from the front of the line.  The '#' means its a comment and removing it means you want this statement to be activated in the configuration settings for your web server.  The statement tells your system to load the PHP module at startup.

Save your changes and its on to the next task.  When we restart your web server, it will now load PHP 5 support.  This is the current version pre installed with Mac OS X (or at least it is on my 10.7 'Lion' system).

One other thing to do before we restart the web server and that is to create a php.ini file to hold the PHP settings you wish to use.

For this task, we are going to open a Terminal window and type in the following:

cd /private/etc 

sudo cp php.ini.default php.ini

The /private/etc directory is where the system will expect to find your PHP .ini file and the 'sudo' tells the system you want to copy the .default php.ini file provided by Apple to the php.ini file your system will use to configure how PHP works on your system.

We will just use the default PHP options at this stage but if you need to you can come back and edit specific PHP options to suit your needs.

You can now restart your inbuilt Apache web server by going to System Preferences > Sharing and uncheck the checkmark next to 'Web sharing' and then recheck the checkmark.  This stops and then restarts the web server.  All going well, it should now read your new configuration settings.

To test PHP is running, and to see the settings it is using, create a file called phpinfo.php with the following in it:

save the file in root directory of your personal web site (hint: did you remember to store the folder in your Finder favourites as indicated in my last blog?)  If you didn't, you should find the right directory in the Sites folder of your Home directory.

Now, if you type the following into your browser  http://[your Mac's name]/~[YourUserName]/phpinfo.php  you should see something that looks like this...

On my system, I am running PHP version 5.3.6, the one that came installed with Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion).

In the information provided, you will be able to see all of your important PHP options.

If you want to modify any, you just need to edit the php.ini file we created earlier.

Now, whenever you create a web site that runs on your Mac's web server, you will have access to PHP.


That's about all for this blog post! 

In the next blog I will tell you a bit about setting RapidWeaver to publish web sites to your personal web server on your Mac.

Thanks for reading! Please feel free to post any questions or comments you may have and I'll try to get back to you as soon as I can :)