iOS Camera AE Lock
I found this camera trick in this CNET video.
- Open the camera app on the iOS home screen.
Tap on the camera icon to open the camera app
- Tap and hold the part of the environment you want to focus. The white square will begin to flash and it will display the text “AE Lock” (Auto Exposure Lock) at the top of the camera button.
The flashing white square and the text
- Once you lock the exposure, you can take a different photo with locked AE.
Photo taken from the locked AE of a different environment
One thing to note is that be sure not to lock the place where is too bright or too dark. In doing so, it will cause the negative effect:
In this photo, I locked the brightest part of a different environment and this is the result. (Note that the computer screen is on)
All of the above photos were taken with iPad although the video talks about iPhone. I think this trick applies to all the iOS devices since they have the same operating system.
Although iPad is not suitable for taking photo since it’s too large and tends to shake while taking the photo, I found the best way to avoid the shakiness while holding the iPad to take photo is using Smart Cover.
Using smart cover to stabilize the shot
Using WordPress Multisite Subdomain with Hostmonster
For those who used WordPress multisite feature already know that you can choose between subdirectory (example.com/blog) or subdomain (blog.example.com) install after the new installation.
There are two exceptions however. First exception is that your WordPress installation is over one month old. You can only do the subdomain install after activating the multisite feature. Second is that you are running WordPress on localhost, or your hosting provider doesn’t support the subdomain setup for WordPress (more on that later). In these situations, you can only do the subdirectory install.
In order to use the subdomain install, your hosting provider needs to support creating a wildcard subdomain (*.example.com). If your provider doesn’t support the wildcard subdomain, it will return an error while trying to create the subdomain in the subdomain section of the cPanel.
If you are using Hostmonster and have only one domain in the account, the wildcard subdomain needs to point to the root of the public _html directory.
In the Hostmonster cPanel, navigate to Domain > Subdomains or just type “subdomains” in the Find field at the left side of the cPanel homepage and click Subdomains to enter the subdomains section.
Click the subdomains link under the Domains panel
Or just enter "subdomain" into the Find field and click the subdomains link
Once in the Subdomains section, enter the wildcard (*) into the name field of the subdomain. The next step is very important. cPanel will automatically fills up the Document Root field with whatever the characters you entered into the subdomain name field, in this case “wildcard”. You need to empty that field to make it to point to the root of the document.
cPanel will automatically fills out the Document Root field with "wildcard"
You have to empty the Document Root field manually
After the information are correctly entered, click Create button to create the wildcard subdomain.
From now on you could create the new subdomains directly in WordPress without going through the cPanel, unless the new subdomain you want to create is not WordPress-based site.
Add a new subdomain within WordPress admin
Begin Migrating to the WordPress Multisite (Update 5)
This morning I moved all the files on the site to a subdirectory and replaced with a simple maintainance notification. This blog, however, I decided to stay it online to give migration status update within this post. After the migration completed, I will replace this blog with a brand new look.
Look forward to it.
Update 1: WordPress installed on the main site robbychen.com.
Update 2: Deleted all of the subdomains of the site except blog.robbychen.com for providing the migration status update temporarily.
Update 3: Finally enabled WordPress multisite feature. It took me almost 1 hour to figure out the wildcard subdomain issue. If you only have one domain in your account (which is the primary domain), you don’t have to enter anything in the directory path field when creating the wildcard subdomain. Apparently, cPanel always add the word “wildcard” to the directory field automatically. Make sure you drop this word so that the directory field is empty and press submit. It will create the subdomain without any error.
Update 4: The migration is almost finished. All I need to do is to migrate this blog into the multisite network.
Update 5: The migration finally completed. This blog is now a part of robbychen.com multisite network. I still need to convert my old main site robbychen.com to WordPress. I will keep you updated with the conversion process in a new post.
Transmission on the iPad
Transmission is the default torrent client for most Linux distros. It has fast download speed and requires minimal system resources. Now the iPad 2 has been jailbroken, you can download torrent directly to your iPad by installing Transmission in Cydia. However, as the following screenshot shows, this app doesn’t have an app icon once it is installed.
In order to access the app, just open Safari on the iPad and type localhost:9091.
But there is one issue. Because this app is a daemon, it’s same as a service in Mac/Windows, meaning that the app won’t run until the next time iPad is started, you need to restart your iPad by pressing the sleep button, swipe to power off the device, wait a moment, and press the sleep button again to start the device.
Once the iPad is restarted, open Safari and go to localhost:9091. Then you can start to download torrent by tapping the Open button and paste in the torrent URL.
If you don’t think you can remember this URL or don’t want to type this URL every time you want to download or check the torrent, you can bookmark this URL.
Or if you want more quick way to access the app, the ideal solution is to place an icon on the SpringBoard (or Home Screen) by tapping the ‘Add to Home Screen’ button.
This way you can access the app directly on the Springboard with an added bonus of removing the address bar.
One more thing to remember is that you can view the torrent details (including where the files are downloaded to) by tapping the Inspector button.
After the download is completed, you can either use an iPad app to view the files or transfer to Mac/PC depending on their usages.
iPad 2 Jailbroken!
As you can see in the heading above, I changed the blog name as well as its description to cover more development topics. In addition to web development, I will also discuss mobile development, mainly iOS and Android since I owned iPad 2 and Nexus One.
With the recent jailbreak for A5 devices (iPad 2 and iPhone 4S) released, my iPad 2 has been very useful to me like never before. I installed some Cydia apps such as VLC Media Player, iFile, and Transmission as well as some other Cydia apps and tweaks
Installed Jailbreak apps on my iPad
Installed jailbreak tweaks (extensions) on my iPad
Now that the jailbreak for my iPad is completed, I will be focused on developing Cydia apps. I will post some tutorials on how to develop for Cydia as I learn from across the web, as well as any tips I found when I’m using my iPad.
Apology to my Twitter and identi.ca Followers
This is a quick post to apology all of my Twitter and identi.ca followers for receiving unwanted spam updates from my account.
Because I didn’t login to my social accounts for a long time, I’m surprised to see that there are lots of spam updates in both accounts. All of these updates came from my long-forgotten Tumblr account. It clearly shows that someone has hacked to my Tumblr account.
I disconnected Twitter from the Tumblr account as well as deleted my ping.fm account for posting to identi.ca. For the security measure, I also changed my Tumblr password and closed this account for good.
From this accident I learned that never link the social network accounts to any third-party apps, because you never know when these third-party accounts gets hacked and ruin your social network accounts updates.
A few Updates and some Information regarding SOPA / PIPA
I had not posted anything for a while. So in this post, I will talk about the upcoming updates for this blog as well as this website as whole and my opinion for the SOPA/PIPA bills.
During the last few weeks, I have learned the ins and outs of WordPress, including WordPress multi-site feature, themes, plugins, etc.
In the coming weeks, I will install WordPress to my main site, robbychen.com, create a portfolio theme or a child theme out of an existing portfolio theme out there, and make my main site as my portfolio to showcase the web development and video projects I finished in the past.
I’m also probably to remove this blog as well as MySQL database that associated with it to migrate it to the main site using the multi-site feature.
That’s all for the update. Now for my opinion about the SOPA / PIPA bills.
In the last couple of days, I read so much about these two bills and how bad they are. I even joined the blackout protest yesterday on this domain. I always thought that the Internet piracy is illegal until I stumbled across this TED presentation.
It basically stated in the presentation that the large media companies have been behind these copyright bills since decades ago. They don’t want us to become the producers and share contents around. They want us to become consumers and just be the “couch-potatoes”. I think that’s why the Internet piracy is born to encourage people to share contents with each other.
Therefore, even if these two bills passed into laws, there will still be a large army of pirates to challenge these companies and find another way to share contents.
Working with jQuery and CakePHP
Recently I’m working with CakePHP and SQLite to develop a gallery for a client. This is going to be my first CakePHP app.
While I’m working on the admin section, I wanted to allow the client to see the image once the image filename field is out of focused so that he could see if it’s the correct image.
The only JS library included with CakePHP is Prototype. Fortunately, the latest version of CakePHP (1.3.11 as of right now) allows us to include with other JS library. I included jQuery with the help of Js helper:
var $helpers = array("Js"=>array("Jquery"));
The above code is included with the whatever controller(s) you want to use this helper. In my case is galleries_controller.php and images_controller.php.
Then I just need to add the following code into the corresponding views, in my case is some of the admin views (admin_edit.ctp, and admin_add.ctp):
echo $this->Js->set("imageLoc", $this->Html->image("0"));
echo $this->Js->get("#GalleryCover")->event("blur", "$('#cover').html(window.beta.imageLoc.substring(0, window.beta.imageLoc.length-12) + 'images/' + $('#GalleryPath').val() + '/thumb/' + $(this).val() + '" />');");
Note that I used image object in the Html helper to generate a dummy img tag so that I could precisely get the image folder location in the webroot folder. Then I used set object in the Js helper to transfer this generated PHP value to Javascript variable “imageLoc”. The second line is self-explanatory if you know jQuery. Here is the documentation in the CakePHP Cookbook for you to review.
In the jQuery code section of the second line, I used the substring function to remove the last 12 characters in the img tag (0″ alt=”" />). And used the html function to include the generated code into the “cover” div. Every time the “GalleryCover” field is blurred out of focus, the image inside the “cover” div would change to the corresponding images.
If you need more information on how to use CakePHP generated Javascript variables, please refer to the second article in the reference section.
Do you have any other tips on how to incorporate jQuery into CakePHP? Please share them in the comment below.
Reference
Switching to Mac
After several months of deciding which OS I’m going to switch next because I don’t like how Ubuntu is going since 10.10, I have been giving Mac OS X a try.
I bought an old 13 inch Macbook Air first generation from eBay one months ago and have kept using it since then. When I used this Macbook Air which is from 2008 for the first time, I immediately felt love for it.
Perhaps because there are some similarities between Mac OS and Linux commands, working in the Terminal app is like a second nature to me. Plus, with my experience with Windows in the past, I already knew most of the common operations on the Mac.
The main reason I like to try Mac is because of the influence of my iPod Touch. Yes, I’ve still kept my old second generation iPod Touch along with my Nexus One, with the latest iOS installed. After I switched to Android (Nexus One) for a long time and restart using iPod Touch to perform the iOS-specific tasks, I feel that the Android interface is kind of old compare to the iOS’s.
Several weeks after the purchase of Macbook Air, I upgraded to the latest version of Mac OS X, Lion (10.7). I love this upgrade, especially the Full Screen and Mission Control features.
As a developer and programmer, I like trying new programming languages such as Objective C and AppleScript. Oh, except Java, because I think Java is too complicated for me to understand, that’s why I avoid programming for Android. With the Macbook Air, I could use Xcode to learn and experiment with these programming languages in no time.
For future posts, I will explore some of these programming languages. This blog will have the same topic (web-related programming) plus new programming languages. I will redesign the blog corresponding to my Mac usage in the near future as well.
Of course, I will continue to use Ubuntu 10.04 as my laptop is still running it. Right now and for the time being however, I’m using Mac more than Ubuntu because I just can’t resist the Mac OS’s interface 
Not only its interface, I also enjoy using its hardware. I especially chose to buy Macbook Air over other Macbook laptops because of its lightness and fast processing power.
Look forward to my future posts which will be written in the new OS environment.
Do you have any experience on how to use Mac OS X and Ubuntu/Linux together without sacrifice Ubuntu/Linux? Discuss your experience below.
Remove AIO SEO related Columns with Greasemonkey and jQuery in WordPress
Since I installed All in One SEO plugin, I have a hard time to look for the specified posts on the Posts page within the WordPress admin area because of the three added SEO-related columns.
All in One SEO plugin is enabled
I don’t like the look of this page, and besides, I don’t use these columns very much. I mainly use this plugin to automatically generate SEO required meta information.
The plugin doesn’t have the option to remove these columns, and editing its source files is useless since they will be restored once the plugin is updated. Using Greasemonkey to modify the layout of the posts page is the only option to permanently to remove these columns.
However, I used to use jQuery to write JavaScript. Writing the raw JavaScript code is a little challenging to me. Fortunately, 0.8 to the latest version of Greasemonkey has the @require metadata block. I can use it to include the jQuery library.
So I wrote the following small segment of code to automatically remove the SEO-related columns once the posts page is loaded:
// ==UserScript==
// @name AIO SEO posts columns remover
// @namespace AIOseo
// @require http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js
// @include http://blog2.robbychen.com/wp-admin/edit.php
// ==/UserScript==
$(document).ready(function() {
$("*[class*='seo']").remove();
});
After the above script is executed, the posts page is now returned to the original layout.
Greasemonkey script loaded
In the above code, I select all the elements and remove the elements which the class name which contains “seo”:
$("*[class*='seo']").remove();
According to the jQuery document, it is called Attribute Contains Selector.
I like to use this layout most of time. If I want to see these three columns for SEO purpose in the future, I would just disable Greasemonkey to show them.
Do you have any suggestion what to do with these column? Post them below.