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{ Monthly Archives } February 2009

Scheduling tasks with PHP

I've got a cheap website that doesn't let me use cron to schedule tasks (like database backups), so I had to do it myself. I found pseudo-cron, which looks cool but has some bugs and was more complicated than I wanted, so I wrote a simple PHP script to do what I wanted.

Daylight Savings Time and the AT&T 8525

I use an AT&T 8525 smartphone (it's the HTC Hermes TyTN) that a friend recommended (some friend!). I've been pulling my hair out with its daylight savings bug—events have the correct time in Outlook on the computer, but are an hour off or worse on the phone. Outlook stores events in UTC and displays them […]

The Agony of Unicode (and backing up mySQL)

All I wanted to do was back up the Young Israel databases, some way more amenable to automation than phpMyAdmin. There are lots of PHP-based solutions on the web, but all seem based on mysqldump. I implemented one and found myself faced with an eyeful of אריאל מאיר יעקב בן דוד אברהם where the Hebrew […]

$.later: binding jQuery plugin methods

I don't like writing function(){$(this).doStuff()} for callbacks and wanted some more elegant way of binding objects to functions. I could always use something like Prototype's bind, but I don't want to modify built-in types (because John Resig says not to) and I generally just want to bind plugins to jQuery objects, so it ought to […]

New plugin scrollIntoView

One thing that bugged me about my textpopup plugin was that the popup would not necessarily be visible on screen. datepicker moves the widget to a visible spot on screen, which I find very disconcerting. Ariel Flesler's scrollTo was my inspiration, but it scrolls an element so that its top left corner is at the […]