Masters Mobile Website on iPhone

By comparison if you visit the Masters site from a desktop browser, you get a “full” desktop experience, including a video that runs as soon as you visit the site.

On the mobile site I noticed the highlight videos worked correctly on my Android phone, but not on the iPhone for some reason.

What if the world’s largest online media corporation opened its doors to “hackers” allowed them access to some of its most important features to see what they could create?

That’s what happened in September 2008, when over 300 developers descended on Yahoo!’s campus for an event that is every coder’s dream.

This first Yahoo! short film documentary will present the intense, fun and real-life Hack culture as illustrated by the Open Hack Day attendees. The short will show the lives of the participating hackers as they hack and compete in the ultimate in developer/coder showdown, discovering not only their obsessive “hack” habits and personalities, but also share what the developer community is all about.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

The test setup I’m using has the laptop connected through a wired network cable, and using the laptop’s Wi-Fi as a local access point or hotspot:

Mac Wireless Test Setup

Not surprisingly, doing this on a Mac is easier than Windows 7. Here are the steps to create a shared Wi-Fi connection:

1. Connect the laptop to a wired Ethernet connection. Go to System Preferences ⇒ Network ⇒ AirPort; make sure AirPort is on, and disconnect from any wireless networks. Confirm that the internet connection is working in this wired configuration.
2. Go to the Sharing settings (click Show All ⇒ Sharing.
3. Click to highlight Internet Sharing on the left (but don’t click the check box yet).
4. Ensure “Share your connection from” is set to Ethernet, and “to computers using” is set to AirPort.
5. Click AirPort options, give it a network name, enable encryption and enter a password (I usually use WEP here but you could pick one of the more robust options)
6. Click the check mark for Internet Sharing, and choose Start at the confirmation dialog.
7. Your AirPort symbol in the Apple menu bar should now have a gray background with a white arrow pointing up.
8. Now you should be able to connect to your local network using a mobile phone or tablet, using the network name you used above.

When you are done testing, make sure to turn off the shared Wi-Fi network by unchecking Internet Sharing.

The test setup I’m using has the laptop connected through a wired network cable, and using the laptop’s Wi-Fi as a local access point or hotspot:

Windows Wireless Test Setup

Here are the steps to create a shared Wi-Fi connection:

First, connect the laptop to a wired ethernet connection. If the Wi-Fi adapter is connected to a network, disconnect it. Confirm that the internet connection is working in this wired configuration.

Next, open a command prompt in administrator mode (e.g. right click on a Cmd shortcut and choose “Run as Administrator…”).

Use these commands to create a local “virtual Wi-Fi” network, replacing MyNet and MyPassword with values of your choice:

netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=allow ssid=MyNet key=MyPassword
netsh wlan start hostednetwork

Finally, share your wired internet connection with the virtual Wi-Fi adapter we just created. Now click Control Panel ⇒ Network and Internet ⇒ Network and Sharing Center ⇒ Change Adapter Settings. Right-click your wired internet connection and select Properties. On the Sharing tab, check “Allow other network users to connect…” and choose your Virtual Wi-Fi Adaptor. (For an example see this screenshot from my PC; the wired connection is “LAN”, and the virtual Wi-Fi is “Wireless Network Connection 2”.)

Now you should be able to connect to your local network using a mobile phone or tablet, using the network name you used above (e.g., MyNet).

Once everything is running and a mobile device is connected, you can show the current network status:

C:\>netsh wlan show hostednetwork

Hosted network settings
-----------------------
    Mode                   : Allowed
    SSID name              : "Variable"
    Max number of clients  : 100
    Authentication         : WPA2-Personal
    Cipher                 : CCMP

Hosted network status
---------------------
    Status                 : Started
    BSSID                  : ac:81:12:2e:1a:da
    Radio type             : 802.11n
    Channel                : 11
    Number of clients      : 1
        bc:47:60:fb:1a:75        Authenticated

When you are done testing, make sure to turn off the shared Wi-Fi network:

netsh wlan stop hostednetwork

For more information, see these write-ups which helped me figure out the details of this technique:

• Techradar - How to turn your Windows 7 laptop into a wireless hotspot
• BestVPNService - How to share VPN connection over Wi-Fi

Instead of the manual steps I list above, here are a couple of software solutions that can manage these settings for you. On my HP laptop, I could not get either to work correctly, but these may be worth trying:

• Virtual Router - open source
• Connectify Me - commercial program with a free “light” version

DuckDuckGo does not collect or share personal information. That is our privacy policy in a nutshell. The rest of this page tries to explain why you should care.

Like most other search engines, DuckDuckGo offers a search box code snippet that can be used for site-specific search. Adding this to a Movable Type blog is very straightforward:

1. Create your own search box on the DuckDuckGo site (make sure to add your domain in the Site Search field); copy and save the iframe code snippet
2. Login to your Movable Type installation and navigate to the Widgets page
3. Create a new widget named “SearchDuckDuckGo” and set the content as shown below
4. Add the SearchDuckDuckGo widget to the appropriate widget set
5. Rebuild your blog to see the results

The Movable Type widget code will look like the following, with the <iframe> portion copied from the DuckDuckGo site:

<div class="widget-search widget">
  <h3 class="widget-header">Search
  <div class="widget-content">
    <iframe src="http://duckduckgo.com/..."></iframe>
  </div>
</div>

If you have a little more room, you can get fancier and include the DuckDuckGo logo, or use the banner version which has a quick summary of the service:

DuckDuckGo Search Box Examples

Note: These steps were confirmed on Movable Type 4.x and should be similar on 5.x.

To remove your profile from both services, their FAQ provides the steps needed:

I found my Profile in search engines like Google and I don’t want it there. How do I remove it?

Both members and non-members of Center.Spoke have the choice to remove their profile from being viewed in search engines, although the process for each is different. Members can remove their information using functionality for managing their profile. Simply edit your privacy settings to ‘Private’ and the profile will be removed from any Search Engine results.

If you would prefer to remove your profile from search engines, but are not a member, access your profile by searching for your name on Center.Spoke.com and choosing the profile you would like to remove. When viewing the profile, click the “This is me” button. On the next page, locate the ‘To suppress your profile, click here’ link on the right side of the next page and follow the instructions.

Please note, you will need access to a corporate email address to remove a profile, but that access to the email address associated with the profile you would like to remove is not mandatory. Center.Spoke requires a corporate email address to remove profiles so that identities can be verified and fraudulent claims can be avoided. If you do not have a corporate email address, please log a support ticket for further assistance.

How do I remove my profile from the new service, WWW.Spoke.com?

Removing member information from www.spoke.com is easy. We ask that you do so sparingly, as the collective value to the business information ecosystem is made greater by every relevant piece of data that we are able to provide it with. However, that being said, we are sensitive to the fact that not every business professional wants to have a presence on the internet and for these cases, we’ve put in place a process that you can use to request suppression.

First start from a page on www.spoke.com (note that if you are reading this, you are on center.spoke.com, not www.spoke.com). Simply go to your profile page, click the link at the bottom that will initiate this removal process, and submit the completed form. After we have approved your request, it is important to note that it can take from a few days to several weeks for links to a profile to be fully removed from search engines’ rankings. Unfortunately this part of the process is not under our control and is dependent upon the indexing activities of the search engines.

After following these steps, your Spoke.com page will probably appear up in search results for a little while, but should eventually clear stop. In any case, anyone clicking on my profile will just see the message “This profile is no longer available”.

I recommend not installing their toolbar or providing any further information on the site. You should be able to give just enough to “claim” your profile, then disable the public view of it.

Here are the steps to manually set your own HTTP proxy for the Galaxy Tab:

First, tap on the Settings → Wireless & Network → Wi-Fi settings. Under the list of Wi-Fi networks, tap and hold on your currently connected network:

Find the Wi-Fi network you’re connected to, and tap & hold

When the choice pops up, select Modify Network:

Tap on Modify Network

Next, in the network settings dialog, scroll down to find the Proxy Settings entry. (You may want to drop the onscreen keyboard to make it easier to find.) Change the Proxy Settings choice to Manual, then enter the proxy hostname or IP address, and the port number:

Change Proxy Settings to Manual, then enter hostname (or IP address) and port number

With these changes in place, all HTTP traffic from the Android browser should now connect through the proxy you specified. In my case I’m using Fiddler on a Windows PC, so I’m using the IP address of that PC, and the default Fiddler port of 8888.

Remember to change the Proxy Settings value back to None when you are done testing.

Also note that these changes only affect the Android browser, and don’t work for other Android applications.

For one project we decided to try JIRA OnDemand and couldn’t be happier with the results. For only $10/month for the first 10 users, we’ve got a shared online tracking system that both companies can access. We divided the 10 users up across the two companies, and were up and running in about 10 minutes.

It helps that JIRA is pretty simple to learn and use, especially for anyone who’s used any type of bug tracking system. We’ve got email notifications, attachment support, and the ability to converse in detail on each issue as we resolve them.

Highly recommended!

JIRA OnDemand pricing starts at an easy $10 per month for 10 users

Some conclusions so far:

• Some questions get answered very quickly - if you watch the most recent questions you’ll see a small number of page views, but a bunch of answers already. Must be a lot of people watching the newest questions and trying to contribute.
• Answering older questions is worthwhile if the originator has a decent accept rate. Corollary: it’s not worth bothering with really old questions asked by User1234 with only 1 reputation point.
• Editing tag (wiki) descriptions is a good way to contribute for lesser-known tags.
• Upvoting good quality questions and answers is a good way to keep up the overall quality level of the site

Check out my sweet Stack Overflow flair badge!

The Curl website describes it as:

… a command line tool for transferring data with URL syntax, supporting DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, GOPHER, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, POP3, POP3S, RTMP, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMTP, SMTPS, TELNET and TFTP. curl supports SSL certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading, HTTP form based upload, proxies, cookies, user+password authentication (Basic, Digest, NTLM, Negotiate, kerberos…), file transfer resume, proxy tunneling and a busload of other useful tricks.

There are many things that Curl can do, and there is a voluminous man page that lists all of the details.

Here I want to boil down all those options into the most common and useful ones for web or webservices developers (using HTTP/HTTPS protocols). If you don’t already have Curl installed on your system (try running curl from a command prompt), see Getting Curl below.

Basic Usage

The basic form of all Curl commands is:

curl [options...] <url>

For example:

$ curl http://www.google.com/humans.txt
Google is built by a large team of engineers, designers, researchers, robots, and others in many different sites across the globe. It is updated continuously, and built with more tools and technologies than we can shake a stick at. If you'd like to help us out, see google.com/jobs.

Common Options

Options are the real power of of Curl. Here we’ll cover the most common ones that I’ve used for typical web and webservices development. (You can get the full set of options on your system with curl --help or curl --manual.)

-A / —user-agent AGENT

Set the HTTP User Agent string if you don’t want the default “curl” string

—compressed

Add the HTTP header to request compressed content, if the server can provide it

-d / —data DATA

Set data to be sent with a POST request

-D / —dump-header FILE

Save the response headers to a separate file

-H / —header HEADER

Set a custom HTTP header

-i / —include

Include the response headers in the output

-k / —insecure

Skip SSL certification verification

-o / —output FILE

Write output to a file rather than stdout

-s / —silent

Run silently (i.e., don’t show progress meter)

—trace-ascii FILE

Write request and response headers and data to local file

-x / —proxy HOST:PORT

Route data through the given proxy

-X / —request METHOD

Set custom HTTP method (GET, PUT, POST, DELETE)

Examples

Fetch and Save Web Page

$ curl --silent http://boston.com -o boston.html  
$ head boston.html
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="900;url=?refresh=true">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>Boston.com - Boston, MA news, breaking news, sports, video</title>

Check Size Without Downloading

$ curl --head http://s3.amazonaws.com/hanselminutes/hanselminutes_0300.mp3
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
x-amz-request-id: 31D80700E3C2811E
Date: Wed, 11 Jan 2012 04:01:35 GMT
Last-Modified: Sat, 07 Jan 2012 02:49:49 GMT
ETag: "1d08609ab5434eea651e95af332ddb3a"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Type: audio/mpeg
Content-Length: 24474192
Server: AmazonS3

Getting Curl

If you’re running Mac OSX, Linux, FreeBSD, or similar systems, you’ve probably already got Curl installed. (Try curl --version to double-check your version.)

If you’re running Windows, you’ll need to download it yourself. Start at the Curl downloads page and find the Win32 section. I suggest the “Win32 - Generic binary, with SSL” option. You will also need the Windows OpenSSL libraries; I suggest using the “Win32 OpenSSL v1.x Light” installer. Make sure to put both Curl and OpenSSL libraries in the same location, and add that location to your path.