So I was completely thrilled to come across the OSX Error Code Lookup Tool.  Download, compile, and plug in your error code — it’ll give you something good back!

UIImage *patternImage = [UIImage imageWithContentsOfFile:[[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"patternImage" ofType:@"png"]];

[myView setBackgroundColor:[UIColor colorWithPatternImage: patternImage]];

• scheme (http://)
• authority (www.example.com:80)
• path (/path/to/file/page.htm)
• query (key=val)
• fragment (foo)

You can read more about all of this in RFC3986.  Today I’m just focusing on the fragment part.

Frequently, you have an NSURL object and may just want the URL without the fragment, to find distinct pages in a site for example.

This Objective-C category on the NSURL object does just that.

header:

//
//  PDNSURLExtras.h
//
//  Created by Eric Vitiello on 11/5/09.
//  Copyright 2009 Eric Vitiello. All rights reserved.
//

#import 

@interface NSURL (PDExtras)
- (NSURL *)urlByRemovingFragment;
@end

implementation:

//
//  PDNSURLExtras.m
//
//  Created by Eric Vitiello on 11/5/09.
//  Copyright 2009 Eric Vitiello. All rights reserved.
//

#import "PDNSURLExtras.h"

@implementation NSURL (PDExtras)

-(NSURL *)urlByRemovingFragment {
	NSString *urlString = [self absoluteString];
	// Find that last component in the string from the end to make sure to get the last one
	NSRange fragmentRange = [urlString rangeOfString:@"#" options:NSBackwardsSearch];
	if (fragmentRange.location != NSNotFound) {
		// Chop the fragment.
		NSString* newURLString = [urlString substringToIndex:fragmentRange.location];
		return [NSURL URLWithString:newURLString];
	} else {
		return self;
	}
}

@end

To use:

NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://www.example.com:80/path/to/file/page.htm?key=val#foo"];
NSURL *urlWithoutFragment = [url urlByRemovingFragment];

Nice and simple. Enjoy!

So, for future reference, you can force Magpie to parse the feed according to the encoding you need by setting a constant before calling magpie:

define('MAGPIE_OUTPUT_ENCODING', 'UTF-8');


That’s all. Your feed will look good.

[UIImage imageNamed:]

if you use:

[UIImage imageWithContentsOfFile:]

the image will not be cached.

Luckily another developer has created the iPhone / iPod Touch Backup Extractor, which extracts all of the data for an application from the backups made by iTunes when you sync your device.

What a wonderful thing.  Thank you, Pádraig.

It turns out that the Apple WebDAVFS (and some other WebDAV client implementations) have problems with the Apache WebDAV.  Just a minor incompatibility, but annoying nonetheless.  There is a configuration change that needs to be made in the httpd.conf to fix this problem:

BrowserMatch "^WebDAVFS/1.+" redirect-carefully

This should work for all future 1.x versions of WebDAVFS on OS X. I limited it to 1.x assuming that maybe, just maybe, they might fix this “problem” in version 2.0.

It’s a simple change, and will make Apache “redirect carefully”. For those interested, Apache says:

This forces the server to be more careful when sending a redirect to the client. This is typically used when a client has a known problem handling redirects. This was originally implemented as a result of a problem with Microsoft’s WebFolders software which has a problem handling redirects on directory resources via DAV methods.

If course, I would think it should always be “careful” about redirecting, but that’s just me. Maybe redirecting carelessly is the best default.

Parse error:  syntax error, unexpected ‘)’, expecting T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM in C:\wamp\index.php on line 201

Apparently it’s hebrew for “double colon”.

You learn something new every day.

I became interested in this because I started to write an extension for Firefox 2 to display all of the websites I work on that are in development — the overhead was far too much for the return, so I stopped working on it.

Luckily, with Firefox 3, the places infrastructure allows me to do this very easily.  For instance this bookmark will list out all of the items in your history, sorted recently visited first, that contain the text ’staging’.  Quite handy.

I’m sure there is a better way to do this.  I tried the uri parameter, but it kept crashing Firefox.  In any case, it’s a nice addition, and another testament to SQLite’s applicability to many areas of web and application development.