SuperGeekery: A blog probably of interest only to nerds by John F Morton.

I’ve used Nav­i­cat for years. I’ve used MAMP Pro for years. Both tools are must-haves as far as I’m con­cerned, but I had been hav­ing prob­lems with spe­cial char­ac­ters being cor­rupt­ed for near­ly 6 months. Every curly quote, m‑dash or umlaut was tor­tur­ous. Briefly, the prob­lem was that those spe­cial char­ac­ters (like curly quotes) would be changed to ques­tion marks in my data­base after I had migrat­ed it to or from my local devel­op­ment… + read on

I recent­ly worked on a project for a client who want­ed to allow a user to view and print sev­er­al recipes direct­ly from a Flash ban­ner. There were oth­er ways of inter­act­ing with the recipes, like email­ing, shar­ing on Face­book, and shar­ing on Twit­ter. (I don’t go into those oth­er things in this post, but you can find me talk­ing about how to do things like that else­where on SuperGeek­ery.) The client also want­ed… + read on

I recent­ly had to set up an MX record for a client and although I’ve set them up before, it sud­den­ly made sense to me in a way that it hadn’t before. Per­haps my sto­ry will help some­one else have a sim­i­lar epiphany. Basic name serv­er set up. My client had their site and their mail all han­dled by the same serv­ing com­pa­ny. This meant their name serv­er records were basic. There were 3… + read on

There are a vari­ety of ways to pass­word pro­tect pages online. Per­haps the eas­i­est is to use an .htac­cess file. The rea­son this is the eas­i­est way is because it’s built into the con­trol pan­el at many host­ing com­pa­nies. I use Dreamhost and it’s con­trol pan­el makes it auto­mat­ic. Sweet. If you don’t have that as part of your host­ing pack­age, check out this arti­cle at htm­l­lite for a walk through on do it… + read on

Yes­ter­day was Michael Jackson’s Memo­r­i­al ser­vice. The world mourned. Yes, the world mourned. As I watched TV with much of the world, I won­dered what we were mourn­ing. I didn’t ask that as a way of dis­parag­ing Michael’s tal­ents. I’ve been a fan of his music like you prob­a­bly have too. But the fact that I can even say that you were prob­a­bly a fan of his music is what I think we’re mourn­ing,… + read on

I spent elec­tion night using tech­nol­o­gy to an extreme. Twit­ter, Face­book, Text Mes­sage, and a vari­ety of sites and wid­gets. My friend Eduar­do, aka Dudu, in Brazil and I, in New York, exchanged quite a few tweets about the night’s out­come emerged. Social tech­nol­o­gy allowed this great night to be enjoyed by a huge num­ber of peo­ple all across the globe and I’m very hap­py to have been a part of it. Dudu asked… + read on

This past Thurs­day night I was lucky to be part of group of peo­ple got togeth­er to talk about the state of dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing, tech­nol­o­gy and what the future holds for mar­ket­ing in the dig­i­tal age. John Haake, from Eye­blaster, was the host at Val­Bel­la. The evening wasn’t pre­sent­ed as an Eye­blaster event though. No one talked about their tech­nol­o­gy or what they were sell­ing. It was just a dis­cus­sion amongst peo­ple who care… + read on

Sev­er­al months ago, I brought a Super 8 film reel to Pac-Lab, a film trans­fer shop in New York. If you’ve got some reels of film you want to be trans­ferred, I would high­ly rec­om­mend con­tact­ing them. (Update: Sad­ly, Pac-lab closed in Spring 2014.) They were real­ly friend­ly. This sin­gle roll cost me $35 to trans­fer, but it would have been cheap­er if I had more than one reel. It was cer­tain­ly worth the… + read on

This morn­ing, Hillary Clin­ton offi­cial­ly announced her pres­i­den­tial ambi­tions. My impres­sion is that Hillary Clin­ton a real­ly smart per­son, who is def­i­nite­ly up the dif­fi­cult task of being pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States. The oth­er can­di­date com­pet­ing for my vote, Barack Oba­ma, also seems like a smart, capa­ble per­son who may also be up for that chal­lenge. (I’m sor­ry, John Edwards, you’re not up to the chal­lenge when com­pet­ing against these two.) But who… + read on

I have until June to fig­ure out how I get out of my Ver­i­zon Wire­less con­tract. That’s 5 months to plan. In case you’re one of the 54 peo­ple who didn’t already know about the iPhone. I’ve been at CES all week long where all kinds of amaz­ing tech­nol­o­gy have been intro­duced. The only so-called ​“news alert” I received from ABC​News​.com about any­thing tech­nol­o­gy relat­ed was for the iPhone. I noticed peo­ple surf­ing for… + read on