OhRyan.ca

Now that summer has finally reached The True North (strong and free), I decided to finally attempt cold brewing some iced coffee. Turns out it’s one of the easiest operations I’ve ever attempted in the kitchen. Basic recipies is as follow:

- 1cup coarse ground coffee
- 4.5cups water
- combine, leave in fridge for around 12hours
- filter
- drink

I brewed it in my french press carafe overnight – with a saran wrap lid to keep out any potentially nasty fridge smells. In the morning I used the french press as usual. Unfortunately, this left the coffee more gritty than when using a french press with hot coffee, the cold water must keep the smallest grinds in suspension more readily. Next time I’ll either forgo the french press altogether and directly filter the coffee through a regular filter, or possible dual filter it (the later seems less messy).

[ Original Recipe From Internet Food Association via Lifehacker]

Don’t use them!

At the very least, don’t bookmark distracting sites. After a recent hard drive failure, I found myself without a bookmarks backup. I’ve discovered that just the act of starting to type the url of some productivity sucking site is enough to make me think twice.

I haven’t see a whole lot of information around the intertubes about what it’s actually like to deploy an iPhone App. Sure there are stories every other week about Apple’s ridiculously inconsistent censorship, and talk of developers not being paid. But there is not a lot of information about the actual process of getting App into the iTunes Store.

I’m going to go through a couple of different steps in the process and talk about some of the unexpected problems. I must say though, I was not very impressed. Nothing about the process is very “Apple-like.”

Continue reading

This article is out of date, check my latest code snippet here.
Back in 2007 I wrote a post detailing a method for detecting and redirecting mobile browsers using .htaccess. Since then the mobile landscape has changed quite a bit: iPhone and Android have been released, the PDA market is all but dead and phones are better in general.

My original post was based on a PHP script by Andy Moore. It’s worth noting that he has continued to update his script and now has a fancy little generator to help you create a PHP based redirect ruleset. Check out detectmobilebrowsers.mobi for more info.

His solution will probably work for a lot of applications, but there are 2 main reasons I prefer using Apache’s rewrite rules to redirect mobile browsers:
1) Application independent. By putting the rules in the root .htaccess file you can easily redirect traffic across multiple directories, independent of any webapp that might or might not be running in those directories.
2) Faster. Placing the rewrite rules in apache’s httpd.conf file is potentially faster, than running the regexp in a php script for every request.

Enough of that, here’s the updated ruleset.

# don't apply the rules if you're already in the mobile directory, infintine loop
# you'll want to test against the host if you're using a subdomain
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/mobiledirectoryhere/.*$
# if the browser accepts these mime-types, it's definitely mobile, or pretending to be
RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} "text\/vnd\.wap\.wml|application\/vnd\.wap\.xhtml\+xml" [NC,OR]
# a bunch of user agent tests
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "sony|symbian|nokia|samsung|mobile|windows ce|epoc|opera" [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "mini|nitro|j2me|midp-|cldc-|netfront|mot|up\.browser|up\.link|audiovox"[NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "blackberry|ericsson,|panasonic|philips|sanyo|sharp|sie-"[NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "portalmmm|blazer|avantgo|danger|palm|series60|palmsource|pocketpc"[NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "smartphone|rover|ipaq|au-mic,|alcatel|ericy|vodafone\/|wap1\.|wap2\.|iPhone|android"[NC]
# put your rewrite rules here


Text Version

As you can see, the user agent list is a fair bit less verbose. I’ve been testing the ruleset on a very busy site, based on over 250k mobile site hits this set of rules is causing a lot fewer false positives, while not missing any significant number of mobile browsers.

I actually found a use for yahoo pipes!

Problem: I import my blog posts to facebook as Notes via their import settings. I find that a lot of friends and family comment on those posts, these people don’t typically follow me anywhere else and – I can admit it – I’m a comment whore. I apprieciate the feedback. Unfortunately facebook only allows you to import one RSS feed. 

Solution: Create a Yahoo! pipe that includes all my blog feeds and sorts them by pubDate. Import that Yahoo! Pipes feed into facebook. 

Here is a link to my feed (you’ll need a Yahoo! account to view the source)