stringify

My wife and I play a silly little game to pass the time on long road trips. It consists of taking note of license plates from as many states (and Canadian provinces) as possible while on the road.

Typically, we just scribble them down on a piece of paper and count them up at the end of a trip. But as we all know, if something is worth doing, it is worth overdoing, so I went ahead and made an iPhone “web app” (if one can even call it that) to manage the process.

I call it Interstate. It is about as simple as an iPhone app can be, providing an alphabetical checklist and running tally. Here is a screen shot:

Check it out using your iPhone (or Safari 3.x) at http://interstate.stringify.com/.

How to start off a client relationship on the wrong foot, in four easy steps:

1. Tell the client they can call you at a specific time
2. Leave your phone out of earshot at said time
3. ???
4. Unprofit!

Did you know that URLs in HTML attributes can be specified as being protocol relative? I didn’t, until I came across something like this in someone else’s code I was perusing:

<script src="//www.example.com/script.js"></script>

At first I thought this was a mistake, perhaps some sort of copy-paste error. But I soon learned that this is a nifty trick to allow resources (images, scripts, etc.) to load over whatever protocol the containing page is using, either http: or https:.

How is this useful? It ensures your external resources will not generate “mixed content” warnings whenever your page is loaded over a secure (https:) connection. This is particularly evident in IE, whenever a secure page contains references to non-secure resources.

Ned Batchelder has more details.

Introducing EveryBlock

Local news done right, brought to you by one of the creators of the Django framework and his team.

Django People

Meanwhile, the other founder put together this gem of a web app, helping folks in the Django community find each other. Phoenix represent!

My kids got a lot of toys for Christmas this year. Too many, in fact. My brother-in-law described his family’s similar windfall as “an embarrassment of riches”. This, in addition to a mountains of toys they already have, is a source of much cognitive dissonance for me. The older I get, the more I want to live simply and have less stuff. I want to teach my kids to be thankful for what they have, and to avoid the pitfalls of materialism. But I am up against doting grandparents and in-laws who are incurable shoppers and gift-givers. To deny them their ingrained demonstration of affection only serves to make me look like miserly Ebenezer Scrooge. It is a losing battle.

So for now I will focus my energies on the most pressing issue: finding a place for all this stuff. I have a feeling that many trips to Goodwill are in my future.