Year: 2012

‘Tis the season… to not visit websites

Here’s an interesting tidbit from the life of a web developer.

You’d think that people would go on the internet with that shiny new phone/tablet/toaster they got for the holiday season.

Apparently, no one does that. Here’s a look at my latest hits (not the band type, I mean the number of visitors to hathix.com):

hathix visitors graph
As the festive spirit goes up, visits to websites go down.

From what I’ve seen, this seems to be the case with pretty much every website and app: visits or downloads sharply decrease during holiday season. For what it’s worth, things return right back to normal once the new year begins.

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Watch videos and play music with VLC

This is a review of VLC, a free multimedia player for movies and music. Download it here.

Happy holidays! To go along with that DVD of your favorite movie, that CD of your favorite band, and that ugly sweater from your favorite aunt, here’s a present of a program: VLC!

VLC is a free, open-source multimedia program for any operating system (Windows, Mac, Linux, even Android) that can play movies, music, the whole nine yards. Did I mention it’s free?

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The future of smartphones

Google Android and Apple iOS fighting
Move over, Android and iOS. You have company.

Right now, if you want to buy a smartphone you have two main options: iPhone and Android. If you’re feeling brave, there’s Windows Phone. Not much variety.

All that is about to change.

This coming year is going to see the release of new, free smartphone operating systems that seem poised to change the world of smartphones – for the better. Let’s take a look.

Ubuntu

Ubuntu, the wildly-popular open-source operating system for computers has been spreading rumors that they’re going to release a version of the operating system for smartphones. The phones aren’t out yet but folks around the internet say they’re definitely in the works.

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Learn Computer Science with Khan Academy

The young man had finished his arduous training period of ten years. The grizzled old man next to him, his tutor, had devoted himself to teaching his pupil the arcane art, an art known only to a select few. Ten years of intense physical labor, deep within the mysterious dungeons and high atop the silver mountains, had finally prepared the battle-scarred young man. He was prepared to unleash his mastery of the dangerous art few knew even existed.

Computer science.

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A Twitter tutorial for beginners: Part 1

Twitter's new Logo, the Blue Bird
Twitter is an extremely powerful social & news network – you just have to learn how to use it.

Twitter is a great social network for catching up on the latest — oh hey, I got a new Tweet! Be back in a second.

Whoops, sorry. As I was saying, Twitter, the “other” social network, is an incredibly quick and easy way to catch up on all the news that’s fit to type in one convenient place. But, in order to fully make use of the #awesomeness that is Twitter, you’ve got to learn a bit. Luckily for you, @I have made one that @you are reading right now. #whatluck

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Why it’s awesome being a developer

Studiofibonacci free icon set of ninjas with weapons
Apparently, these are a bunch of computer programmers.

Ninjas.

That’s what computer programmers are calling themselves nowadays. The profession (if you can even call it that) goes by a litany of none-too-glamorous names, such as developer, programmer, engineer, technician, and more stuff that doesn’t quite make you the most popular guy in the room. Hence, a lot of, er, programmers (for lack of a better word) go by ninja or such. Which I find slightly annoying – you’re writing code, not killing enemies of the emperor. But I digress.

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Sorry for downtime – also, props to WebHostingHub

A closed box package cartoon clip art
Error 404, elephant not found

tl;dr – hathix.com had some downtime but my super-helpful host WebHostingHub cleared it up immediately. Also, I apologize for the fanboyishness – it’s just that WHH is that awesome.

I was recently working with some so-called cutting-edge web programming techniques (parsing JSON using PHP from client requests using JavaScript and jQuery… told you it was gory) and realized I needed a new version of some software on the server that hathix lives on.

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