Well I’ll say a lot and only time will really tell and if you’re wondering what I’m talking about, it’s the recently launched Google Buzz.

Google Buzz is an application that allows you to share web links, photos, videos etc with people who are important to you but that’s only half the story. Google Buzz for Mobile is a location based service that allows users of the application to share messages and pictures that are location-aware.

In my attempt to explain it to my girlfriend, I used this example. Assume I walk into an eatery and I discover that they’re giving a free donut for every purchase above ₦500. I can quickly create a buzz to spread the word. Now because I’m using my phone which has a built-in GPS, it records my location and every other person who sees the buzz can identify the location.

There are countless other use cases. Imagine a community service that allows community members to report accidents using Google Buzz for Mobile. Others might include, crime reporting, reporting lost items, reviews and so on.

I’ve been playing around with it and I’m hoping to see more people come on board to give it a try. If you do not have an Iphone or Android 2.0 compatible phone, your best bet would be to attempt to install Google Maps for Mobile 4.0 by visiting http://mobile.google.com/ on your mobile phone and clicking on Google Maps. If your phone is supported and you can install Google Maps for Mobile version 4.0, then you can enable the Buzz layer and start buzzing.

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I’ve noticed that people who read a lot of blogs and a lot of books also tend to be intellectually curious, thirsty for knowledge, quicker to adopt new ideas and more likely to do important work.

I wonder which comes first, the curiosity or the success?

<?php $unique_identifier = md5(rand(100000, 999999)); ?>

The problem with this is that I have given an allowance for only 899,999 possible values. I didn’t realize my error until I started getting mysql integrity check errors for a unique column that stored that value.

I reverted to using a more elegant solution:

<?php $unique_identifier = md5(uniqid(rand(), true)); ?>

The uniqid statement generates a globally unique identifier with a rand() prefix and using much more entropy (true).

In case you’re not so conversant with Google Latitude, it’s a location based service that runs on top of Google Maps allowing you to track your geographical location and that of your friends. Your friends will also need to have signed up with Google Latitude for you to be able to track them.

One thing though that I would have loved Google Latitude to have is to alert me when my friends are close by without having to constantly check their location on the application. And the good news is that, it is now possible.

Google Location History is a Google Latitude app that allows you to actually see where you’ve been over time. So you can easily tell all those places you spent the most time in and so on and so forth. With Google Location Alerts, you can get an email or sms alert whenever your friends or colleagues are nearby.

One other feature that would really be cool that’s not out yet will be the ability to tell when any of your friends are at a particular location – say the cinema or a supermarket.

This is hot! Just got an email from Amazon announcing the availability of a free download of the Kindle for PC. Ok like I just explained to a colleague, the Kindle is a device from Amazon that allows you to carry around and read ebooks that you download from the Amazon store.

The Kindle for PC on the other hand, is a software application you download from Amazon that enables you to read the same ebooks as you would on the Kindle device, on your PC.

Kindle for PC Books List

Why the excitement? Well for one, the Kindle was one of the things I had on my wishlist for the Christmas. Even though I still intend to get the device (or some other ebook reader), this is like a wish granted. May be after all, a netbook will not be a bad idea.

This is coming at a time when the Kindle is facing stiff competition from other new entrants. If you asked me, I think this strategy of creating a standalone PC application makes a lot of sense – at least to me.

So I went about contacting some of my colleagues who gave me pointers on whom to see and after making a few contacts, I was well on my way to organizing the seminar.

I got a lot of support there and we were able to get about a hundred diploma students at the University of Jos to attend. I was initially thinking about organizing something strictly for web developers and programmers. I had a few ideas about web-based APIs, mashups, code versioning, improving web application performance, etc. but when I was told the caliber of people who were going to be attending the seminar, I decided to stick to something regular computing students will be interested in.

I gave a presentation on Web APIs and Mashups and after the short slideshow, went into building a practical mashup. I was a little concerned about making sure I didn’t speak over the top of their heads and so looked for something very practical to demonstrate a mashup. I ended up building an application that sent a text message to their mobile phones. Afterwards, I went on to talk about the various freely available APIs on the web that can be used to build smart applications and encouraged them to try them out.

There were only a very few individuals there who had done anything for the web but based on the inquiries I received at the end of the seminar, I knew a lot of them had gotten very interested in making further exploration.

I ended the seminar by talking about web mapping and most especially Google Mapmaker and told them about how Plateau State had very little content on the Internet and how that was an opportunity to do something. I’m told that there are plans to build a team that will take what they’ve learnt from the seminar and do something about it.

The success of the event was more than I envisaged and I’m encouraged to give many of these talks and presentations in other parts of the country.

Essentially, hooks allow you to execute custom scripts when you perform certain actions on your repository like committing files, pulling updates and so on. This is a very useful as you can write hook scripts to (say for example) automatically ftp a file to your web server when a change has been made.

A whole lot of really cool hook scripts have been written and if you use any code versioning tools, you should check out the ones that have been written for the tool you use.

In particular, I find that sometimes developers could check in code that has syntactic bugs. This happens in environments where there are no strict code testing rules. It can be really annoying when you or someone else does this and you have to fix that and then commit again… not professional at all. So I came across this post by Travis Swicegood that lists code that does a php lint on your PHP files before committing them to the repository. PHP lint (php -l) basically checks the syntax of your code and either gives an “ok” or prints the offending line.

For one of the projects I’m working on, I had to change line 11 of Travis’ code to read:

$filename_pattern = '/\.(php|engine|theme|install|inc|module|test)$/';

instead of

$filename_pattern = '/\.php$/';

If you’ve done Drupal coding, you’ll quickly recognize that

I’d been having a particular issue with an API I built for a web application I’m managing and I just couldn’t figure out what was wrong until I got to using the API in an application that had HEX output.

So I put the application in debug mode and watched the communication stream. The API was supposed to return an integer value but instead, I noticed a EF BB BF hex sequence being prepended in the output. All attempts to remove this were futile.

Since I used the Symfony framework for the application, I suspected that it might be a bug and googled for a solution. The best answer I could get was to upgrade the framework, which I did but the problem persisted.

My big break came when I attempted to make another API call to a separate method that resulted in the correct output. While tracing the source of the problem, I traced it back to a php file that was incorrectly saved in the UTF-8 character encoding format; which was included when making the buggy API call. Opening and saving this file in ANSI format solved the problem.

So next time you run into a problem like this, make sure to check the encoding of your source files. Better still, you can use a tool like iconv to convert your files to the appropriate character encoding format.

There was really no point in scratching my head and trying to pull my hair out in order to fix this. So I googled a solution. This post gave me a hint but wasn’t helpful enough so I decided to write a blog post on how to go about solving this.

You’ll have to configure your repository in your .ssh/config file. Here’s an example. Simply substitute the #*# placeholders for the actual values

Host #hostname#
  User #username#
  Hostname #hostname#
  Port #non-standard port#

And if you prefer to use private keys to login:

Host #hostname#
  User #username#
  Hostname #hostname#
  Port #non-standard port#
  PreferredAuthentications publickey
  IdentityFile "#path_to_private_key#"