As you may or may not know, I’ve been doing a lot of work on Facebook in the past year at my current company (henderson bas kohn), and so I did a write-up internally that I thought I’d share with the world.  So, without further adieu…

Timeline will be automatically enabled March 30th – NO EXCEPTIONS, so you need to make sure your clients are prepared.

Here are some of the changes and their impact to the client’s brand pages:

No default landing page

You will no longer be able to set the default landing page for a Facebook page.  This means when users come to a brand page, they will immediately see the timeline, and we will no longer be able to “like gate” a fan page.  That does not mean you cannot still “like gate” promotions or tabs, just you cannot “like gate” the initial landing page.

New cover photo

All brands will need a cover photo – its probably best that you get these designed and in place prior to the March 30th deadline.

Note for creative types: Cover size now 850 x 315px.

Only 3 tabs can be “above the fold”.

There is no longer a left navigation, so tabs appear directly beneath the “cover” photo.  There are 4 tabs (or I guess buttons now) beneath the cover photo, you cannot move the photos tab.  Any additional tabs will appear in the pulldown.

Can now feature content

Brands will now be able to go back in time and enter milestones into the timeline.  Suggestions for milestones are: founding of the company, growth milestones, new product launches, etc.

You can also “highlight” these milestones by making it the full width of the timeline.

You can also “pin” content to the top of the timeline – this would be useful for current promotions, so users will be able to quickly access the in-market promotions.

New Sizes

New app icons must be 111 x 74px in size.

Apps can now be either 520px or 810px.

If you have an existing application at 520px wide, it will simply centre it within the 810px.

Note: Current in-market applications will still work just fine, Facebook has not modified any of this functionality.  You will just need new app icons made for current promotions.

Quite annoying really…

• Anyway, to disable it, just fire up your about:config (open a new tab, type “about:config” and hit enter).
• You’ll get a nice warning (unless you’ve disabled it), just allow it.
• Then in the filter box, type “devtools” and hit enter.
• Find: devtools.inspector.enabled
• Double click so the value goes to false.

Enjoy not having to use the built in Firefox devtools.

On Friday last week, I swapped out my Macbook Pro 15″ for a new Macbook Pro 15″, the only real differences in them is that the new one’s graphics card works properly (doesn’t corrupt randomly), a Core i7 CPU vs Core i5, and a Thunderbolt port.

Today, I came into the office, and started working normally, only to find that my screen would randomly blank out. I have an older 24″ LED Cinema Display at the office, which I absolutely love and wouldn’t trade. However, I couldn’t deal with the blanking out. So, I popped open console, and initially thought it was an issue with a few of my applications, quit them and it was still happening, with nothing being written to the activity log. So then I surmised that it might be a power issue, so I swapped out the UPS under my desk for one that displays power consumption. Power was steady.

Then after much googling, and realizing that a lot of people were having this issue, I happened to come across a fix. Seems apple quietly released a firmware update for their problem.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4045

Hopefully google picks this up so people don’t have to search around quite as much.

In doing a bit of background research, I happened across a Canadian Heritage parody done by none other than Rick Mercer -- video after the jump. To summarize -- Canada -- Gouging consumers since the advent of the telegraph.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0ZGkqQvAVw

I’m a self-professed tech guy, and I literally have spent the last 10 years of my life building / working on the web.  I also find things like network stacks / transmission interesting, so I’ve done a lot of reading on the topic.  So, armed with all that knowledge, I’ve been following this UBB  scandal with some significant interest.  I should also mention that in my house, we have Netflix and make liberal use of the Boxee box that Tania bought me.  With Tania being home / on mat leave -- we can pull anywhere from 3 GB -- 40 GB in a day.  Fortunately we’re signed up with a smaller ISP (Acanac) who are awesome and provide us unlimited bandwidth over cable for less than Rogers was screwing charging us.

Now, what does all that have to do with UBB -- well, lets say I was still paying Rogers (for their terrible service / low bandwidth caps) -- I’d be paying around $60 / month ($46.99 + modem rental + tax) for 60GB of bandwidth with $2 / GB of overage beyond 60GB.  Well, doing some quick math, average usage for my house is 450GB / month -- making my monthly bill from Rogers $840 / month.

Am I a “bandwidth hog”, I wouldn’t consider myself one, if I’m paying for 10mbit service, I expect to be able to use that 10mbit whenever and however I want.  If I decide I want to use 10mbit for an entire month, I’d better be able to pull down 2.5ish TB in a month without incurring overages.

Now, why am I writing all this -- because I do believe in UBB, go ahead and charge me for my usage, I really don’t have a problem with that.  The problem I have is with “what” they’re charging me.  Instead of charging me $2.00 / GB over a set limit, why not charge me a reasonable markup on what they pay for bandwidth.  If it costs them $0.05 / GB (which is what most people are estimating it actually costs Bell / Rogers), then they’d better not charge me more than $0.10 / GB -- plus a flat monthly fee for the connection (something like $20 / month seems reasonable).

So, if the CRTC decides to make Canadian ISP billing into a more utility based billing, they’d better damn well put limits on the markup ISPs can charge.  Of course all this is just me speculating -- Bell / Rogers owns the CRTC, and in the end will get what they want.

In other news I had an awesome family day weekend up in Sauble, and while Nathan decided not to sleep at night, it was still somewhat restful and relaxing. I got some starcraft 2 in with Forrest and realized exactly how much I suck, but we still had a good time. We also decided to make an iOS game, so I’m likely going to make a page for it here. I have my doubts I’ll actually finish it, but who knows.

Now, that being said, I did come up with a way of dealing with resource fork creation – while its not exactly elegant, it works. It just so happens that all my servers are unix based, so to deal with resource fork cleanup, I just added a cronjob to my crontab. This will delete all of OS X’s resource fork files in a specific folder (and subfolders).

0 */1 * * * find /var/www/ -name ‘._*’ -print0 | xargs -t0 rm > /dev/null 2>&1

Note, if you’re going to use this, change the path (/var/www/) to whatever path you want to cleanup.

Also – I take no responsibility for this, make sure you have your data backed up, and all that jazz before you use it.

Well, I’m hoping to finally break the cycle. I just grabbed the new iPhone app for wordpress and am hoping to be able to post quick things happeing in my life, and save the longer posts for when I have time.

memcached as singleton in symfony « ESL Developer Blog.

You can read the first 9 ways here: 9 Ways ISPs Screw You Over.

10.  ISPs advertise speeds in a way that only people who have an understanding of how data is stored can translate.  For example, lets say you pay for a “10 meg” connection, thats not actually 10 Megabytes per second you’re capable of, its actually 10 Megabits.  Now, there’s quite the difference between Megabits and Megabits, but not so much a difference in the acronyms.  MBps is for Megabytes and Mbps is for Megabits.  The real issue here is if you pay for a 10 Megabit per second connection, your maximum transfer rate is only going to be 1.25 Megabytes per second (there are 8 bits in a byte).  Thats also theoretical, you can very rarely actually achieve the theoretical bandwidth provided by your ISP, unless you’re trying to load their homepage or hit a url that they detect doesn’t exist and throw you a page full of ads.

I’ve been a long supporter of transparency from ISPs, but we’re likely never to see that up here in Canada – at least not until the CRTC cracks down and decides we, the consumers, need some competition and not more monopolies.

So, I figured out a quick workaround – simply change the shutdown order, such that Open-ISCSI is shut down after the filesystems have been unmounted.

cd /etc/rc0.d
sudo mv K25open-iscsi S80open-iscsi

Your rc0.d folder should look something like this:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 2009-11-12 10:27 K20sysstat -> ../init.d/sysstat
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 2009-11-12 09:28 K25hwclock.sh -> ../init.d/hwclock.sh
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 26 2009-11-12 09:28 K59mountoverflowtmp -> ../init.d/mountoverflowtmp
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 355 2009-01-23 10:01 README
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 22 2009-11-12 09:29 S15wpa-ifupdown -> ../init.d/wpa-ifupdown
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 2009-11-12 09:28 S20sendsigs -> ../init.d/sendsigs
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 2009-11-12 09:28 S30urandom -> ../init.d/urandom
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 22 2009-11-12 09:28 S31umountnfs.sh -> ../init.d/umountnfs.sh
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 2009-11-12 09:28 S40umountfs -> ../init.d/umountfs
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 2009-11-12 09:28 S60umountroot -> ../init.d/umountroot
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 2009-11-12 10:28 S80open-iscsi -> ../init.d/open-iscsi
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 2009-11-12 09:28 S90halt -> ../init.d/halt

Then, next time you reboot, it should unmount the disks and then stop open-iscsi.