Just launched a Facebook competition for Princess Cruiselines. The application is a trivia contest featuring 20 daily questions. Answers are all based on destinations you can cruise to, and can be found on various Princess web properties. Each correct answer gets you another entry into the sweepstakes, and the winner gets a free cruise for two. This project is part [...]

Just launched the completely redesigned website for Redondo Beach’s Lobster Festival. The site was designed by Champ Creative and is powered by my custom CMS. I was responsible for all coding (front end html/js/css and backend PHP/MySQL). You can see it here: http://lobsterfestival.com

Amazon now recommends you connect to new E2 server instances using the user “ec2-user”. That’s great but what about when you need to perform actions that require root permissions. I spent some time trying to figure out what the default root password is, but turns out you don’t actually need to know. Just do this: Root super powers will then [...]

My ssh connection to some Amazon instances stopped working after I moved around the elastic IP. I got a “Host key verification failed” error. The following fixed the problem. This removes the offending entry from ~/.ssh/known_hosts which was apparently causing ssh to fail.

I just got a new Drobo FS. First thing I wanted to do was use it for hosting SVN repositories of my freelance code. Here’s how to get things up and running.

When you create iframe apps there is some nice code that Facebook provides so that the iframe itself can automatically resize to fit the content without leaving ugly scrollbars. The problem is when you link from the bottom of a long page to a short page you are not taken to the top of that short page, so sometimes all you see if a blank white canvas until you manually scroll up.

I recently worked on a Flash based Facebook application, so of course I needed to use the Facebook multi-friend-selector invite widget. The Facebook javascript SDK makes it fairly easy to launch the request dialog. You have to specify a url for the form action, and by default you are redirected to that url after the invite is sent. This is [...]

There are already loads of resources on the interwebs explaining the purpose of regular expressions so no need to explain further here. (Well basically, they allow you to match and extract patterns of text from strings). I just want to document a few quick examples that I use a lot.

The new graph api makes it really easy to show user profile pictures. It doesn’t however give you your full size profile picture. Find out how to get that too.

I’ve been building a few Facebook applications recently, and would like to share solutions to some things that caused me lots of headaches.