Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio.
Months ago, my beloved iPod nano lost its right ear. That is, the stereo plug became mono. Today, the left ear left the iPod.
I’m not one to take setbacks lightly when it comes to electronics, especially iPods, so I visited the wonderful repair site iFixit. After studying the repair guide for my 4th generation nano I decided this was something I could do myself.
Finding my smallest screwdriver proved to be tough, but minutes later, I discovered it at the bottom of one of my many junk drawers. Jumping in with both feet, I neatly disassembled my purple nano. I am a fan of the Apollo moon landing, and am always amazed at how delicate the spacecraft were. The iPod nano is mainly held together with tape. Some incredibly delicate ribbon cables are held in place with ZIF sockets smaller than a fingernail.
It was step 19 that did me in. I inched the logic board out when millimeters were clearly called for. The delicate ribbon cable for the wheel silently tore.
After realizing my folly, I continued on ahead. How could it get worse? Looking closely at the headphone jack revealed that a simple tweak with my tiniest screwdriver could potentially have saved me the entire disassembly! The connectors for the headphones are gold, thus easily reshaped (which is the root cause of the issue anyway). Sticking a screwdriver into the headphone jack and twisting clockwise should provide enough movement to solve my problem. 
You live, you learn.
Update. After ruining my iPod nano, I inserted my headphones into my laptop to listen to some music. The headphone cable was what shorted out today, not the iPod! Incredibly disappointing.
Thanks to denial, I’m immortal.
Overview
There are a lot of really great ways to communicate securely over the ‘Net. The trouble is, they’re virtually all user-unfriendly.
Today I’d like to start a discussion on making browsing safer and friendlier for everyone. I call it the “Safer Browser” initiative. I’ll discuss a feature virtually all browsers currently implement, why it makes browsing safer, how browser vendors can make it friendlier to use, and how application developers could help us all out.
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Recently I got a Dropbox account.
It’s a great little service; you install a small client to your computer and it then automatically synchronizes a folder with its storage system. Oftentimes I use email to send myself projects at work. Now I don’t worry about it; I Dropbox it. By the time I go to work my folders are already synched up. It’s a cloud-based thumbdrive and you should use it.
Buttery coffee?
This can only mean one thing.
My wife bought French Vanilla
Posted in anecdotes
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Tagged coffee, haiku
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Delivery of Javascript assets can be pretty expensive across the wire. A common way to combat the delivery cost is to minify your script before delivery. This technique is about as close as the web has come to compiling. However, some good practices can actually get in the way of making your scripts well-minified.
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Java 5 enums are powerful things. Anytime you need a limited list of values, you should consider an enum class (versus a String or int). Java 5 enums can have methods as well, which leads to some powerful combinations.
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For some time now, I’ve been working with Spring MVC and Spring Web Flow to build web applications. One option that Spring MVC (and Web Flow by extension) offer is a view resolver that allows you to hide your JSP files behind the magical WEB-INF folder. The excellent Spring MVC tutorial started me on the practice of configuring my view resolver to stash JSPs behind the wall of WEB-INF.
The downside to this approach is that it becomes very difficult to compile those JSP files without walking through one’s application.
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As we all know, Apple recently introduced iPad to the world. Regardless of what you think about the device, I find myself really interested in the brief glimpses it offers about how Apple has been running its business.
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