Keyboard Face

While not a full review of the Kindle Fire versus the Nook and iPad, I did do quite a bit of research into all three before deciding on the Kindle Fire this Holiday Season. It arrived the other day and we are really happy with it.

The reviews I saw comparing the Nook and the Kindle Fire pointed out the differences in hardware and interface. The Nook won in both of those respects, but where it lost was in the media content. The Kindle has access to the entire Amazon media library including all the hit movies, tv shows and music. There is no option on the Nook for downloading movies or music other than through Pandora and Netflix, which are both limited.

Another review of the Kindle Fire vs the Nook said that their web browsing experience on the Kindle was slightly choppy, but workable compared to the Nook. I haven’t experienced any choppiness on the Kindle Fire yet. Everything is extremely smooth and fast.

I was pleasantly surprised to find all of the music and movies I’ve ever purchased through Amazon readily available on the Kindle with a tap of the button. Without any configuring or loading, I was able to play my purchased music (and download it for off-line play) immediately.

The Kindle has 6gb of storage space available on it. The Nook has 16gb of available storage plus it has an SD expansion slot. The KindleFire doesn’t have an expansion slot. That being said, the Kindle Fire is designed to work off of the cloud mostly, and it does a great job at that.

The only other downside to the Kindle Fire is that it doesn’t have Bluetooth support. The Nook doesn’t either. The iPad does (of course).

We purchased a bluetooth adapter for the Kindle Fire that allows us to use our Bluetooth headsets to listen to it without waking the babes.

As far as features and screen size go, the iPad beat both the Kindle Fire and the Nook hands down. However, for some (including us) the smaller screen was actually a plus. Of course the price on the iPad is also much higher.

Happy Shopping!!

There is no function in PHP equivalent to VB or ASP’s left. There is a more robust function called substr. Here’s a function from the forums that replicates the functionality.

function left($string, $count){
return substr($string, 0, $count);
}

Handy reference. Who would have thought April was the best time to buy laptops.

http://lifehacker.com/5736625/the-best-times-to-buy-anything-in-2011

Handy function to remember:

SELECT *
FROM orders AS o
CROSS APPLY (
SELECT linenotes + ‘,’
FROM orderLines AS ol
WHERE ol.orderID = o.orderID
FOR XML PATH(”) )
temp ( listOfLineNotes )

http://www.stillnetstudios.com/concatenating-child-rows/

I have a Windows Server 2008 with IIS7 installed. I’ve been pounding my head against a Microsoft constructed brick wall for the past day trying to get PHP to interact with SQL Server 2008.

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=20098

A brief Google search pulls up a download page from Microsoft with the newest SQL Server drivers for PHP:

In the package you download, there are about 9 different files. You only need to install 1 or 2 and there are no instructions as to which one is the one to install.

In my case, even installing ALL of them didn’t work. My PHPInfo() said there was sql server support, but it wouldn’t connect to the sql server.

FINALLY, I found a single post that explained it. Turned out my PHP version which was installed by IIS7 was too old! For SqlServer to work – you have to have PHP 5.2.4 or newer.
The help instructions that come with it aren’t specific enough.

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/ssdsgetstarted/thread/5fa1215f-5104-40f3-ac5c-872c4812f416

Lastly, here’s a great link that goes over how to actually use the sqlserver connection. Good god!

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/whitepaper-accessing-sql-server-databases-from-php.aspx

One other thing to note if you’re used to working with .NET or Classic ASP. In PHP the field names are case sensitive.

WordPress has an awesome feature where it can automatically upgrade itself, install themes and plugins, etc. It works fantastically on all apache and lamp installations I’ve played with, but never on Windows with IIS.

I recently upgraded to IIS7 and it was still giving me errors when trying to upgrade, install plugins, etc.

I realized that it just didn’t have write access to the file system so it couldn’t download the new files. To fix this, I added the user IIS_WPG to my wp-content directory with write permissions and immediately it worked. The full step by step went:

1. In file explorer, right click on the wp-content directory. Select Properties.

2. Select the Security Tab.

3. Click Edit.

4. Click Add

5. Type IIS_WPG, click Check Names. It should format it.

6. Uncheck Execute, check, Write and Read.

7. Click Apply.

You’re done!

It should work now.

A friend of mine turned me on to Twilio and I have to say it’s pretty kick ass. They did an amazing thing by creating an open source call routing system as well. Not only can you straight out code the routing, etc., but you can use their existing system straight out of the box with little modification.

One thing was lacking for me on the OpenVBX without plugins. The Dial applet that came with it didn’t allow for adding a timeout. Luckily someone did write out the code for modifiying the applet to include timeout and callerid, but it was confusing and I had to spend some time to edit it myself.

I finally got it working, so I’m posting it here.

Here’s the original link:
https://github.com/twilio/OpenVBX/issues/#issue/27

Here’s the link to the modified dial applet that includes caller id and timeout.
Time Out Dial Applet

We have some nice CSS flyout menus on a site I’m working on now. Unfortunately in IE7 and IE8, JQuery UI’s tabs are being displayed above the flyout menus, making it look like flyouts are appearing underneath the tabs – not what we want.

After much digging through code, firebugging, etc., I figured out that the problem has to do with position:relative and position:absolute.

It would appear that position:relative will trump position:absolute no matter what the z-index. Very confusing and frustrating.

The fix I ended up using was to add a inline style of position:static on the tags that were being made relative. This fixed it and I didn’t have to edit the JQueryUI generated CSS.

It’s hard to describe, but one thing lacking in most horizontal CSS menus is a persistent hover state for the top level element.

Let me explain – say you hover over the tab “About Us”, and it is supposed to drop down to show other items in that section. When you move the mouse down to hover over these items, personally, I feel the hover state of About Us should stay on to indicate that you’re in that section.

Unfortunately, almost all CSS menus don’t do this. I found one that does, however – Here it is:

http://www.venturelab.co.uk/devblog/2010/06/creating-a-pure-css-dropdown-menu/

The key bit of code is excerpted here:

#nav li:hover a{ /* Set styles for top level when dropdown is hovered */
background:#6b0c36; /* Solid colour fall-back */
background:rgba(107,12,54,0.75); /* It’ll look nice semi-transparent */
text-decoration:underline;
}
This gets tricky, but it should make sense.
This block of code here is where the hover styles come in, there’s a bit of nifty code in there which controls what we’ll call ‘persisting hover states’ on the top level item even when the user is hovering the dropdown items…

#nav li:hover a is what allows you to give the top level link a persisting hover state when hovering its ‘children’. This works by styling every link inside a list-item when that list-item is hovered.

Just last week, Periodontist Directory.com was updated to include Canada. Periodontists are dental specialists with advanced training in the diagnosis and treatment of Gum Disease and other gum problems. Many of them also provide dental implants to replace missing teeth.

The directory allows you to find a periodontist using either your zip code or your area code.