Just as expected…

February 7th, 2010 by Justin

Just as expected, Warcraft Update got a automatic refresh for the new Warcraft event titled “Love is in the Air”. It started a few hours ago and the new header looks great.

Warcraft Update Valentines

I also added the #wow hash tag along side the #warcraft hash tag to Twitter posts. I was never a fan of putting just #wow because it can mean so many things to so many people; because so many people post warcraft related tweets under #wow I decided to give it a shot.

Rogers Drops the Ball again

January 20th, 2010 by Justin

Congratulations Rogers, you have once again thrown an unnecessary step into something that was otherwise doing fine. Today Rogers enabled the new “Quick Start” Guide on my cable boxes. It’s this little menu that pops up when you press the “Guide” button on the remote. You can no longer get to the Channel Guide by clicking the self explanatory guide button. No, you have to press guide twice to get to the real channel guide.

This inconvenience has customers up in arms about this “feature”. I called the Rogers support line and requested it be turned off, they told me that’s impossible. The only way to live life without the “Quick Start” guide is to go to your local Rogers store and exchange your box for a PACE model; but who knows when that will be updated with this crappy feature.

Rogers, do us a favor, let us turn this off.

Apple OSX Security Fail

January 19th, 2010 by Justin

My laptop asks for a password every time I close the lid. I can’t use it unless I put it the password. This time it asked for the password, but it still let me use it anyways.

Apple OSX password security fail

Apple OSX password security fail

Caffeine Wise

January 1st, 2010 by Justin

The newest addition to my portfolio has just launched.
Caffeine Wise

CaffeineWise was created because after drinking the same few drinks several times over just gets boring. I am now out into the world looking for my new favorite drink.

Starting in January 2010 CaffeineWise will be putting up a new drink review every Friday until they either run out of drinks, or run out of cash. Lets hope neither of those happen.

Check out the Red Bull review that was just released.

p.s. Happy New Year.

Goodbye Apple Care, It was nice knowing you

December 30th, 2009 by Justin

My MacBook is officially old. The 3 years of Apple Care warranty expired last month and now my laptop is expected to fend for it’s self.

I don’t always treat my stuff with the utmost of care. I use them for what they are, things; and If chucking my things around is what I want to do then that’s what I’m going to do. To commemorate this 3 year anniversary I’m going to list all the times Apple Care has saved my ass:

  1. LCD back light starts to flicker. Fixed in 2 days. No questions asked.
  2. Charger catches on fire. Send me a new one the next day.
  3. Cracks near my keyboard start to appear. Took it in just in-case they could do something about it. They did. Got a new keyboard and track pad. Woot.
  4. Battery occasionally cut out. New one the next day.
  5. Back light stopped working and cracks in the plastic around the LCD. Fixed in 2 days.

Was paying for Apple Care worth it? Totally.

Google Public DNS in OSX

December 25th, 2009 by Justin

Google recently launched a public DNS system for everyone to use. This caught my interest because my current ISP’s DNS redirects me to a ’search’ page that 9 times out of 10 shows irrelevant content. I’m sure it’s there just to make money off the sponsored results.

If you have read this far and have no idea what a DNS is, then maybe a bit of explaining is in order. DNS stands for Domain Name System. In a nutshell, every time you type a website’s address into your browser (like google.com) your browser uses a DNS to find out exactly where that address goes to. Without a DNS, you would go nowhere.

What makes this Google DNS so awesome is that users no longer have to rely on the ISP to direct them to websites. Oftentimes my internet provider’s DNS is slow and serves up annoying ads when an address cant be found. Not anymore with Google DNS. (Things are noticeably quicker after using the service as well)

Enough talk already, I’ll show you how to set up Google DNS in Apple OSX:

Step 1: Open up “System Preferences”

Step 2: Inside System Preferences, select “Network”

Step 3: Select your network device. In my case I am using Airport, but others may be using Ethernet.

Step 4: Once you have selected your network device, click the “Advanced” button in the lower right of the window.

Step 5: Click on the DNS tab.

Step 6: Click the + under the DNS box and type: 8.8.8.8

Step 7: Repeat step 6, but type 8.8.4.4 instead.

Step 8: Press the OK button and hit Apply. You’re done.

Hope this speed us your internet browsing as much as it sped up mine.

P.S. Merry Christmas.

Warcraft Update header is live

December 15th, 2009 by Justin

As mentioned a few posts ago, I had been finishing up on a Warcraft Update festive header plug-in for the site. As of this morning, all systems are go. Head over to http://warcraftupdate.net to check it out in all it’s glory.

I have decided to hold back on adding festive headers to the facebook app for now. I wanted to work out any kinks it has on the main site before moving it across to other platforms.

The Cutest Thing You Will See Today

December 6th, 2009 by Justin

This is a baby hedgehog. It is cuter than kittens.

hedgehog

Warcraft Update gets festive

December 1st, 2009 by Justin

Although the results are not yet visible, I have added some seasonal touches to Warcraft Update. Every in-game event has its own icon set that is used on wowarmory. Warcraft Update will pull those images and display them along the header of the main site and the Facebook app.

Look for the first festive header when Winter Veil begins.

Screen shot 2009-12-01 at 4.00.50 AM

Autoloading Propel in Zend Framework

November 21st, 2009 by Justin

Lately I have been working on a new project using Zend Framework as the MVC and Propel as the database objects. I have been searching high and low for a way to autoload the Propel classes using Zend_Loader_Autoload. Turns out the solution is very simple.

Propel has it’s own built in autoloader and accessing it couldn’t be easier.

First off, locate the config file generated by propel. It would be in the /build/conf folder.
Next, include Propel.php in your main index.php.
Then run the init function and pass it the path to your config file.

require_once 'propel/Propel.php';
Propel::init("models/build/conf/mydatabase-conf.php");

After that all your files should autoload.

If you are having problems make sure your your application path and your /build/classes folder are in your include paths