I’ve been thinking of getting a new digital camera for a few months now. I had a Fuji Finepix E510 for a couple of years, and it was good in it’s time, but it definitely had some disadvantages. The most noticeable one was the light meter. It was very difficult to get the camera to focus in lower light. I’m not talking about being outside in the dark, I’m talking about being indoors at night.

A friend of mine bought the Canon DS630 Digital ELPH at Christmas time, and I finally got a chance to play around with it last weekend. I was sold. It was exactly what I was looking for. My favourite feature is continuous shooting. I can hold down the shutter button and the camera will take pictures every .5 seconds or so until the SD card is full. It’s the same for video at 640 x 480. That’s a lot of video on a 2GB memory card.

Anyway, I’m sure I’ll be taking lots of pictures in the next while.

I’ve been meaning to change the ringtone on my RAZR for quite a while now from the 24 Ringtone, but I couldn’t find anything that I liked until I came across a copy of the Apple iPhone Ringtone.

Changing the ringtone took me half an hour because Telus decided that they only want you to be able to get ringtones from them. You can’t simply transfer the file through Bluetooth or USB. Oh, the file will get there just fine, and you can even play it with the media browser, but there is no option to use it as a ringtone.

The only way to get it to work is to use BitPim to delete the sound database files MyToneDB and TmpTneDB from the file structure and reboot the phone. These two files get rebuilt on boot, and then the sound file will show as available for use as a ringtone.

Anyway, feel free to download either of these two ringtones. If you need any help getting them on your Telus RAZR, let me know. I definitely didn’t post full instructions here.

Erin and I are planning a trip to Florida this spring, and since we’re flying out of Saint John, we’re going to need passports. This in itself is fine. I understand that the U.S. wants to increase border security, but the actual process of getting a passport is a major pain in the ass. Because of the new security measures, as of Jan. 31, all Canadians flying into the U.S. need to have passports, so you can imagine the surge of applications they’ve received in the past few weeks. This is causing delays of up to 2 months, and extremely long waits at the passport office.

I was told that if you start your passport application online, it speeds things up considerably, so I did. Between my wife’s application and my own, we spent about 3 hours filling them out, checking them over, and printing them according to the incredibly strict guidelines (the margins had to be measured out to the millimeter).

Then there’s the process of finding a guarantor to vouch for you. Though the guarantor can’t be just anybody, he or she has to be somebody like a doctor, lawyer, priest, etc.. Apparently, the rest of us aren’t trustworthy enough to the Canadian government to vouch for somebody.

Anyway, after that is the wait at the passport office. This is an extremely fun place to be. I love being surrounded by grumpy people and screaming kids. Luckily that only lasted for about 40 minutes. Because I had filled out my form online, I got to jump ahead of everybody who did things the old fashioned way. Suckers.

This process is definitely not enjoyable. I recommend holding off if you don’t plan to fly into the States any time soon.

One of the bugs features of Internet Explorer is it’s insistence on caching anything and everything. IE caching has cost me many hours of debugging time since I started doing Ajax development last year.

My most recent problem was a form I had that described an image. I would modify one of the fields in this form and save it, but the change didn’t reflect when I reloaded the page. After ruling out the PHP code and the database as the source of the bug, I did some research about caching in IE (since this problem didn’t occur in any other browser).

What I found was that you have to be careful when making ajax GET requests in IE. If you make a request to a URL with the same query string as another request made recently, IE figures that the page won’t have changed, so it pulls it from cache. Once I found this, it was a snap to avoid the problem.

There are two ways to handle this. One is to use POST request all the time. I don’t like to do this unless I’m submitting a form, so I use the second method which is to make the GET query string unique. I do this by adding a random string at the end:

http = createRequestObject();
var d = new Date();
var time = d.getTime();
var url = 'library.php?' + action + '&time=' + time;
http.open('GET', url,true);
http.onreadystatechange = handleResponse;
http.send(null);

This way, IE will never try to use a cached copy of your page.

Path Finder is a replacement for the OS X Finder. It offers many helpful features over the built-in file browser, such as tabbed windows, folder history, integrated Stuffit engine for context-menu compression, integrated terminal, image thumbnails (love this), the ability to show hidden files for($i = 0; $i < 0; $i++){echo “, and on “;}

I’ve been using it for about 2 months now. At first I didn’t think it was anything special, but over the past few weeks, I find myself taking advantage of more and more of it’s great features. I’m at the point that I don’t know how I got along without it in the first place. It’s definitely on my list of top 10 Mac apps.