iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

Finally! Finally someone creates a Firefox plug-in that that takes advantage of the native PDFKit in OSX to display PDF files in Firefox. Everyone tolerates Adobe Reader on IE and Safari, but it doesn’t even work with Firefox on the Mac – leaving Mac Firefox users to chase down PDF files on their desktop every time they come across one to then open it in Preview. This process was only slightly fast than Adobe Acrobat for Safari.

Thanks to “colesbury” over on Google code for finally making what seemed so trivial a reality: Here’s hoping your implementation spurs the Mozilla foundation to integrate this feature in Firefox for the Mac.

.. thanks to me.

I just wanted to toot my own horn and let everyone know that a modification I made to our local Centre for Teaching, Learning and Educational Technologies “Client Relationship Manager” (AKA any other set of words that match CRM) called INTERLEAVE will be incorporated into the next release.

Interleave is a (business) process automation application and what I implemented to track my own work at Brock University. It allows me to stay on top of issues and names, and ultimately be able hand-off issues with some accountability and be able to report on the work I do year-to-year.

Our installation was getting a little slow, and I had tracked it to having a lot of clients and that creating a lot of communication between the web server and the database in certain situations. INTERLEAVE has it’s own caching infrastructure to speed this situations up so I took a look at it and just wrote some simple PHP code around it to have it store the cached items inAPC’s cache instead of the database.

This is an advantage because APC implements shared memory in PHP (among other things) and that allows to be stored between transmission between the web server and the client WITHOUT the need for a database, or the internal communication and overhead that requires. There a number of tools that do this for PHP, but APC is the one that should be included into PHP 6.

I posted my update to the INTERLEAVE Forum. Hidde, the creator and project manager of INTERLEAVE apparently likes the idea and has taken my code, which would work without APC installed but complain, and enhanced it to not complain and apparently it’s going in the next release of INTERLEAVE. I was glad to help as INTERLEAVE is great tool and I want to help the project as much as I can.

Lastly, if you haven’t installed APC on your PHP-based server I highly recommend it. Having all of your files pre-compiled with the option to tell APC/PHP to not look at the files on the drive at all when requested is a significant speed boost for any site. If you modify your code like Mediawiki/Wikipedia have (which is where I first learned of it) or as Facebook has, it can significantly speed-up the execution of your PHP scripts and allow for systems that might require Java or ASPX to be implemented in PHP.

I am loving Google Sync for my iPhone!

Google recently announced their Google Sync service for the iPhone. The highlights are it leverages the great Google Mail (plus Contacts) and Calendar services with the best sync/push protocol out there: Microsoft’s Active Sync.

At work, Brock University, migrating our small department to MS Exchange has been an option for a while, however I’ve been waiting to recommend it until the labour and confusion involved in the transition would balance-off the benefit. Now that essentially the same service has come to the rest of my life once I had it working I immediately started trying to get my wife to add it to her iPod touch!

The value of Google Sync is all of those features that the corporate world has been using over the last decade can now be enjoyed by us promiscuous web users with the ubiquitous web tools Google has developed — a big class silo that anyone can jump into and radiate out of, unlike corporate Exchange systems.

Not only do I have all my Google calendars, contacts and all of my E-Mail in my pocket but I can also get new items instantly added to my calendar.

I installed it today after waiting a few todays to confirm that all the buzz was positive. Here’s the positive experiences I’ve had today:

1. I was mid-way through writing an E-Mail on my iPhone when I realized I had an old address for someone. I then quickly looked up on my desktop the person’s new address on Facebook and changed it in my address book. I then picked my iPhone back up and it was ready to auto-complete the new address — without even having to open an close Mail on the iPhone!
2. My wife and I keep a common calendar on Google Calendar so we know where we need to go on which weekends: Now we’ve got that common information everywhere we go — soon we’ll never have to speak to each other again!

Google Sync brings the benefits of corporate Exchange/BlankBerry culture to us socially promiscuous web hipsters.

If you haven’t been there yet I highly recommend MP Dan McTeague’s “Tomorrow’s Gas Prices Today” web site. It delivers what it promises based on a formula that factors in today’s closing price for bulk gas on the New York exchange and projects tomorrow’s price.

–Updated Friday; March 12, 2010
The site even provides an RSS feed of the prices (featured above)!

If you have a phone with a mobile browser I recommend bookmarking either the web site or one of the RSS feeds. You could even use that RSS feed and a service like RSSFWD to forward that information to your E-Mail (or Blackberry, etc.)

After learning today that Groundhogs have about a 30% accuracy record for predicting the end of winter I’ve decided to get in the game myself: I’ve flipped a coin.

The rules were:

• Heads: Spring comes early (good for a head cold)
• Tails: 6 more weeks of winter (a long tale)

This year’s result: Tails – 6 more weeks of winter

6 more weeks of winter agrees with with Wiarton Willie and the rest. I don’t know if that is a good start.