Learning PHP for web/mobile development

Economy got you down? Why not improve your skills to better position yourself fro when an opportunity does come along, One method might be trying to learn an easy to use programming language like PHP!

PHP allows one to create dynamic actions on a webpage or within a mobile application (iPhone/iPad/Android). For example, using PHP one may send email or access a database and send results to a web page or mobile device.

AdobeTV hosts a good video describing use of PHP within their Dreamweaver product. Low on cash? Not to worry one can also use notepad or any number of free editors to create a PHP web page. Just google 'free PHP editor' (without the quotes), then download and install your editor to begin the creative process. For other great videos check out the Adobe TV website and create a free account to review all of their tutorials.

Using Find and Replace on MacOSX

Terminal - Multiple Find / Replace

If you want to take a walk on the geek side, try popping open terminal from spotlight. I recently needed to parse a webarchive to find and replace absolute paths with relative paths. Ultimately the following worked:

find . -name "*.htm*" -exec  sed -ie 's/href="\//href=".\//g' {} \;

Using terminal one can issue many Unix commands. One way to get help is to type the 'man' - short for manual and the name of the command:

So in the instance above, one  might type:

man find (shows the manual page for find)

man sed (shows the manual page for stream editor)

iTunes Sync Fix (iTunes U)

Hi all,


Just taking a moment to share what I've learned after a walk on the wild side with iTunes Sync. I was having a problem getting my iTunes U videos to sync with my iPad. After a comprehensive search of the web, all of the solutions that I found were commercial (i.e. someone pushing a product).


As a programmer, I found the thought of buying a solution wacky (imagine buying a product to manage another product that changes every year). Instead I kept reading and found that the iTunes Library is a plist file (this is a special kind of XML file used by Apple and installed on MacOS). I thought "aha" this must be the problem and so I found an application (from Apple) called plutil. 


NOTE- One purpose of putil (usage: putil -s path\filename.xml) is to check whether the plist files are correctly formatted.


To my utter shock, the iTunes Library.xml file was perfectly fine (note to self, make sure to backup this file). Next I tried examining the related iTunes *.plist files and found that these were also correct. Hmm, then I remembered that iTunes also loads a second application when one logs into the system called iTunesHelper. 


After researching a bit more I discovered the purpose of iTunesHelper is to assist in the communication between your device and iTunes (interesting). So being a programmer, I did the obvious thing. I closed iTunes, opened my Activity Monitor (on Windows this is the task manager), found iTunesHelper, and turned it off.

Next I restarted iTunes, verified that iTunesHelper was still off, plugged in my iPad, and crossed my fingers. 


Voila!, sync back in action. 

The lesson learned is that things designed to enable communication may also disable communication when not working properly.