This is an open letter to the people who run Meetup.com.

First off I want to let you know the people you serve truly appreciate what you have put together. I've been attending Meetups for years and its really great to have this turnkey system for spawning associations. However I'm also disappointed to see that every would be Craig is spawning their own social network in an attempt to lure singles into their micro-emipre.

I think the biggest problem is that membership is a commodity and everyone wants in on the action.

The Mac has more files and directories than most people "need to see" but if you are using it as a developer, those files and directories can be important. Here's how to show all the files and paths on the Mac.

Go to a console, and type the following:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool true

killall Finder

Like most engineers, I have an irrational lust towards the newest technology. Even when it is applied to tasks that I ordinarily frarm out to third world nations, like cleaning, if its new, technically sophisticated, and looks like its capable of autonomous killing sprees, I need to have one.

Every time you release a new product you need a captivating slogan to capture the imagination of your target market. With Windows 7 coming out, I'd like to suggest:

So its not exactly magic -- but if you have to do a "check all" checkbox on a list of things, Dojo's query method works quite nicely:

Despite the fact that it went all ass-wonky on my laptop, forcing me to buy a mini, I am reinvested into JavaFX.

Like most thinks Java (oh yes, it is Java) JavaFX does have a protective membrane preventing people who don't know what they are doing (or who don't RTFM) from using it. Once you break through, though, there is a termendous amount of UI and linguistic power behind the platform.

The big word on the Mac has always been that "It is way more expensive than a regular PC", as emphasized by the recent Microsoft/PC commercials. (You know the ones with regular people shopping for computers -- I'm waiting for the cue card guy from Redomond to end up on film.)

I don't know if I was overthinking it or just unlucky but it took me a while to "get" this very simple and practical way to change one dropdown's option, based on another.  The context here was that you choose your state (California, etc.) and your choice of utilities (being based on your state) change too.

One of the neatest and simplest tricks I've picked up lately is the use of the PHP native output buffering (OB) menu. I have always hated embedded/echoed markup, but found it necessary if you want to return a string rather than dump it to the screen.

Another possible use for output buffering is that you can push work to the screen for the benefit of the audience while you continue to compute page elements in the server. (a sort of "server side ajax".)

I don't have console access to WLL so I have to do everything with old school FTP. This means packing up projects like Zupal which have a signifacnt overhead of SVN files. So how do I delete the svn repository? with a handy little snippet I found on the net:

#!/bin/sh
echo "recursively removing .svn folders from"
pwd
rm -rf `find . -type d -name .svn`