Spicer Matthews

When it comes to hardware and operating systems I am one of the biggest Apple fan boys out there. When it comes to software and control I am truly annoyed by Apple. As a side note I am an Apple share holder and I love what they do from a business stand point. Apple has held back music players for years. They released iTunes a long time ago and it blew all the music players out of the water. Back then compiled desktop based software was cool. Then they went full speed ahead with the Apple iTunes music store. This was amazing from a lets kill cd’s standpoint.

I have a library of music that I have gotten from all different sources; Amazon, iTunes, cd rips, and so on. I want to stuff all this music in one bloat free place and have it with me everywhere I go. If I am 100% an Apple user this place is iTunes, but I am not. I have an Android phone, a windows netbook, linux laptop, Apple desktop, Apple laptop. There is no easy way with iTunes to keep all these devices in sync when it comes to my music. Nor do I want my 13 Gig music stash living on all these devices. The service that was about to do all this was Lala.com until Apple purchased then and closed them down. Grooveshark.com has sort of done it but their way of doing things is a little odd and they use way to much flash.

Continue Reading

The type of web programing I do often has a large database back-end with which requires user input and data return. In the olden days you just created an html form and then posted some input data to some cgi (say PHP script) and the script would speak with the database and return some html causing the browser to reload on post. Now that we are a super cool web 2.0 world we do not do this anymore we make javascript use Ajax to do the post for us. If you are anything like me you take one look at javascript and say “no thank you”. Most people hate the syntax of javascript, the confusion of the language, or the browser compatibility issues; when I say most people I am including me. This is where our friends at Jquery come to the rescue http://jquery.com (more on them in another post).

Continue Reading