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After reading a post on Cult of Mac about the "9 Things Apple Needs to Fix in iOS 5 Before Launch" I got a little peeved as a developer.

Here are my "3 reasons why I hate hearing about non-developers installing iOS 5"

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Wanted to outline how I backup my VPS with Linode. Backups are very important. You want to create a plan that's redundant, tested, and foolproof.

First you want to figure out what to back up. For me it's my MySQL data, web, and configuration files to make a rebuild a little easier. For my server this means two directories: /home/user and /etc. To backup MySQL I'll run mysqldump and that file will be saved in my homedir for easy access later.

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I finally got around to setting up Stashboard for myself and I have to say I'm impressed. There were a few hurdles with the installation but that was related to Google App Engine. I'll explain a bit about the app and process.

Stashboard allows you to create a publically availible "Status board" of your services. These services can really be anything as at first glance Stashboard just allows you to edit the site manually and set if a service is up or down along with a description of what's going on. This is usefull for services that rhyme with "bitter" that go down quite often, heh.

There is also a simple to use REST interface that handles statuses so if you're an API junkie like me this will be a lot of fun to integrate in to your own applications. This is something I'm looking forward to playing with at a later date. For now I just want to see if the services I have set up are connectable or not and have the added bonus of this being done automatically. I'm the main consumer of this site so it's pointless to just update it for me.

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This isn't my code but I wanted to share a snippet that really helped me out today. I wanted to set default fields for NSUserDefaults and have a Settings.bundle file for my app so those same preferences can be set through Settings.app. Instead of using registerDefaults and duplicating those values, this code will read and set your defaults from Settings.bundle. Some tweaking is required to determine if the settings are saved (the name key).

Source http://stackoverflow.com/questions/510216/can-you-make-the-settings-in-settings-bundle-default-even-if-you-dont-open-the-s

Well, I've ditched WordPress. It was too much "blog" for me that I didn't need. Plus now that I no longer host it myself I don't have to worry about it's swiss cheese like security and keeping on top of patches. I didn't even bother keeping it's old content around. I might repost some of the good stuff but for now that's all gone.