Man there’s good stuff on the net, and sometimes I even get a moment to read it!

• Jamie Rumbelow‘s, got a good start to a series of CodeIgniter articles with his first part of The Guide to CI Databases.
• From the “D’uh, why didn’t I think of that!” department comes the excellent (and funny) CleverAndy.  You know all those designs you do that your clients pass on for one reason or another?  CleverAndy helps you find them homes so they don’t go to the island for misfit toys (or um… whatever the design equivalent is).
• 36 seconds!  Fedor Emelianenko… wow.  You are a bad, bad man.  But seriously… Megadeth?
• Learning ExpressionEngine?  Micheal Boyink (he of the mighty pogo) has put together Train -EE just for you.  Fantastic resources, including instructor led workshop training.  Congrats Mike, this is the way it’s meant to be done!
• jQuery sparklines.  Looks to sweet to pass on.

Get it while its hot!  BambooInvoice 0.86 features a slew of features and bug fixes including some obvious and useful ones, as well as a few treats. 

For full details, see the changelog.

Instant message has become a part of my daily life.  I use it pretty much non stop for work, and my work involves writing a lot of code.  It isn’t uncommon for me to send something like

I like iChat (Adium of course is the old favourite, but hasn’t been used much since I moved to Leopard and Apple improved iChat so much), but sometimes it’s too cute for its own good.  This is especially true of the “helpful” way it converts :) and ;) into and respectively. Helpful in the same way that Clippy was helpful.

This behaviour gets very annoying when one is trying to look at code.  The above code example becomes .  You can image how annoying this is when every third line of chat is code.  So I went hunting through the iChat preferences to find a little box I could uncheck and turn off smileys, only there was no box to be found.

A quick trip through google didn’t turn up too much either, but I was able to figure out where iChat kept its preferences for that.  A minute later, I had figured out a way to turn them off.  Here’s how:

Browse to /Applications/iChat.app, and “Show Package Contents”.

Next up, browse into Contents/Resources/English.lproj and look for a file called SmileyTable.plist.  This is where all the smiley definitions are stored.  Without it, iChat can’t translate smiles, so rename it to “SmileyTable.plist.banished”.  If you ever want smileys back, just reverse the process!

There, that feels better

Or maybe… just maybe… the Firefox team has been plotting all along, and have actually taken over my site.  Oh well, I can think of many worse things!

If you’re on Firefox 3, then type about:robots into your location bar.

Brilliant, funny, witty.  Robots.  What’s not to love?  This is the second time Firefox 3 has impressed me with their wit.  I also wrote about Beta software? Firefox “gets it” last year.

Despite mad work going into ExpressionEngine 2 development, we’ve still be heavily focused on keeping our current products the best we can.  To that end, today we managed to eek both a new version of CI and EE out the door.  While relatively light on new features (there are some nifty ones in there though) the main thrust was a significant improvement to the Input library for both security and performance.  To this end, I’d like to publicly express my gratitude to Pascal Kriete (Inparo), whose tireless efforts helped us immensely.

Time for a little self imposed isolation. For the next 2 weeks, I’m living, breathing, and dreaming ExpressionEngine as me and Derek Jones have left the comfy confines of our homes to drop into the quiet little town of Portland for some serious “think time”.  Over the next 14 days I’ll be considerably less active then usual, as I try to put all my energy into developing.  Most of the crew live in and around Portland, so I’ll get the opportunity to finally meet our new Code Mechanic Jesse Hurlburt face to face, bring Lisa a big plaque picture of all of us as our superhero selves, and get beaten up by Rick (that’s what you get for working for a bjj expert).  Good times.

I’ll try to post images and updates as I go, but I didn’t bring a camera, so I’ll be relying on the charity of strangers, and my macbook’s built in camera.

I've been kind of in isolation the last week or so, (more on that in another post) and I've not even taken the time to read my RSS feeds latesy, only skimming a few things here and there, or marking things for reading later. So today, I had a bit of time, and boy am I glad I took the time to re-visit those! Here are a few wonderful things worth your time to read.

• How To Make An IP-To-Country Tool With PHP and MySQL. Mathew Pennel, web monster and editor of Digital Web Magazine has written up a wonderful article here. I find myself linking to one article every month or two that this guy writes and nodding my head knowingly. This guy is great.
• Doctor Jones has completely made me re-examine Apple's Spaces with his article My Day With the New Spaces.
• jQuery for Designers has written up Coda Slider Effect. Its sexy as all get out. GREAT work there Remy. This is super well done. I will be stealing inspired by you soon!
• Continuing on the jQuery train of thought here is the always excellent jQuery blog. Recently they wrote jQuery UI v1.5 Released, Focus on Consistent API and Effects which contained a few big tidbits in there. Biggest? API standardization. Unless you're a nerd of pretty high-order, that's probably not as cool to you as it is to me, but something that everyone can enjoy - Enchant (the effects library) is being rolled into jQuery proper. I think this is an immensely smart choice if only for marketing jQuery to new users. New users tend to compare feature by feature and make decisions, well now there's a big checkbox in that column. Nice work guys!
• And finally, Block Quotes and Pull Quotes: Examples and Good Practices from Smashing Magazine.

Man, there was some good stuff on tap! Something from each of those will be making their way into my work in the very near future.

I've released a preview copy of 0.8.6 here.

If you've got an adventurous spirit, give it a whirl, if no bugs are found, it will form the basis of the next release.

Keep reading to see the changelog.

I’ve been pursuing my Master’s of Education part-time since 2003.  I took a year and a bit off in the middle of there somewhere, but other then that, I’ve been pretty steadily marching towards it for 5 years.  In April I finally finished off the last of my course requirements, and last week I got the official paperwork; I’ve finally finished off the degree.  Huzzah! I’m now legally allowed to call myself a “Master”, um… not that I ever would.  Oh no wait, I would.

I’ve considered sharing my final thesis with the world but I’ve decided against it.  Frankly, its been under enough scrutiny and the truth is that I just don’t want to think about it anymore.  It’s basically a theory on how to teach highly technical concepts to a largely untechnical audience.  Sort of a theoretical backdrop to the teaching I do.  It may undergo a few changes and get resurrected yet.  We’ll see.

So would I recommend the process to anyone else? In a word, “maybe”.

I finally made the long discussed flip over to jQuery.  It took me about 4 and a half minutes.  It should have been a 30 second process, but I had a few lightbox images relationships named incompatibly.  Anyhow, all fixed up.  I also decided to implement the much talked about Google hosted Javascript library.  In a nutshell, Google is hosting some popular Javascript libraries.  The idea is that if enough people are using the hosted libraries, then there’s a good chance that your visitor has already locally cached the files, and your page will (give the illusion of) load faster.

As a handy extra, they take care of compressing and minifying for you, and are committed to keeping a library online permanently after it is hosted.

That said, I’m not sure how long I’ll keep it.  There are a few things that I think every responsible webmaster has to think about first.  Personally, I would only use it as part of an informed company strategy (I could see a savings on a big site like ExpressionEngine.com in terms of bandwidth and perceived load time).  But there are still some downsides I just haven’t fully reconciled yet.  Let me address the three most relevant ones that I see.