Always Buy a Case

I've been a big fan of the iPhone since it came out but I've always been too cheap to actually pay for the service plan so I've had to live with using iPod Touch. I've had a fourth generation iPod Touch for about four years but last month we finally took the plunge and purchase iPhones!

Two Sundays after we got them my wife and I had plans to purchase cases for them. The day before that, we went for a walk with my daughter and I took my phone out to look something up and I dropped it. On it's face. On the sideway. Breaking it's screen. After less than two weeks.

In the 6 years that I've had my iPod Touch I've dropped it numerous times and never broken it. I think this is because I've always purchased a rugged case.

Enter the iFixit.com

My first plan was to send it into Apple and have them repair it but the estimated price to have just the screen fixed was almost $300!

I started looking into alternatives and I found iFixit.com. They sell a kit with all the tools you need to replace the screen and the screen for a little over $100 after shipping (I was actually amazed someone still charges for shipping but I guess I'm used to buying everything from amazon.com). They also have a nice how to replace the screen guide (which [spoiler alert] is just about the biggest pain in the butt). It took me a couple hours because I REALLY didn't want to break anything extra.

The only thing I wish I had know before hand is that there are two options for this. The one I purchased doesn't have the front facing camera and earpiece speaker and you have to transfer them from the old one to the new one. They have an option with these pieces already installed. It's $10 more expensive but it would have saved me a bunch of work and I wouldn't have had to purchase this iOpener tool that they sell.

Reclaim Your Reserved Hard Drive Space

We just added a 700 GB drive to one of our cloud servers and we ran into a horrible problem. We couldn't use 5% of it.

Normally, this isn't a problem because who really uses 95% of there drive but this particular server is used to store long term backups of STAGES so we need every byte. In order to fix this you can run the following command so it only reserves 1% of the drive:

tune2fs -m 1 /dev/sdaa

Where /deve/sdaa is the newly added drive.

Link Post: Cache is the new RAM

I'm a big fan of performance but I always wonder how many sites actually need this type of performance. That being said, it's a nice article.

http://blog.memsql.com/cache-is-the-new-ram/

Link Post: West Side-project story

I can totally relate to this.

http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2014/11/25/west-side-project-story/

Link Post: Your developers aren’t slow

If it’s not your developers, what’s slowing down development? Here’s a hint: it’s your process.

This is the most interesting part to me:

We see the same basic flow to our tickets. A lot of them get stuck in the "Someday" pile and a lot of them get stuck waiting for acceptance.

I also like there idea of using a mad-lib like template to define a story.

Here are some steps you can take to ensure you’re not slowing your team down:

1. Help your team understand the vision: work with your team to define a vision for how you’re going to make users’ lives better. Be clear about the outcomes your users need. It’s important to have developer buy-in. Their passion for a feature can be a huge driver for velocity.
2. Write well-defined user stories: use a mad-lib or a template for each task you create. Developers should have the power to say no to a task, until it has a detailed description.
3. Reduce context switching costs: don’t interrupt your developers! Before sending them an email or making a request, evaluate the cost to their productivity.

https://sprint.ly/blog/your-developers-arent-slow/

Link Post: Barbie F*cks It Up Again

As the father of a young girl, I'm never happy to see the pink isles at Target but this is just wrong. Sexist comments aside, almost nothing that happens in this book I would file under a "computer engineer" title. I'm guessing they've got some mill that puts out these books and they didn't actually check with a computer engineer (just my snide comment).

Wait, wait. I need you to know something, and this is hard for me to tell you, because I'm guessing that like Helen Jane and me, you maybe believe in the good of people. You still hope that when we turn the page, there will be something empowering for Barbie and Skipper to experience. That maybe Steven and Brian are… I don't know, maybe they could still be girls? But, no. It's about to get even more misogynistic up in here.
http://gizmodo.com/barbie-f-cks-it-up-again-1660326671

Link Post: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

This sounds like crazy talk to me but if it actually works it would be awesome.

http://www.sandisk.com/enterprise/ulltradimm-ssd/

Link Post: Making your development process suck less

http://www.brandonsavage.net/making-your-development-process-suck-less/

Link Post: Installing Composer Packages

I've been using composer wrong...

http://blog.doh.ms/2014/10/13/installing-composer-packages/

What Does the IE Menu Bar Look Like?

The other day one of my clients sent me a screenshot from one of their users and they asked me if I could figure out what version of IE they were using just by the screenshot. I realized I couldn't. I knew IE 6 had the XP looking icons in the top but I really didn't know what else was different between the version. My goal is to continue to update this post as new versions come out so feel free to bookmark it.

IE 6 on Windows XP

IE 7 on Windows XP

IE 8 on Windows XP

IE 8 on Windows 7

IE 9 on Windows 7

IE 10 on Windows 7

IE 11 on Windows 7

IE 10 Desktop on Windows 8

IE 11 Desktop on Windows 8.1

Overall, 9, 10 and 11 are all extremely similar and I'm guessing this will be the layout going forward.