Easy! Reader

While building a Flash game, I wrote some code to alternate through squares on a grid system and it seemed rather slow. My code made use of the % (modulo) operator and, thinking that was the cause, I went in search of a better solution. I blew the dust off the Bitwise operator (&) and researched what it actually does. As it turns out, this little bit of programming’s past can be quite handy.

Comments & corrections are always welcome and if you have any similiar tricks to share, I’d love to hear about them.

The fine follks over at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital are looking for a designer/developer to join their 5-person Intranet team. This year, they will be redesigning their employee intranet and moving from a static website to a role-based portal. They will also be implementing a new CMS to run the show.So if you’re an experienced designer/developer with good information architecture skills (an ar comfortable working in a Microsoft shop) who is interested in leading a team (not just coding alone in the dark), give them a shout.

I have spent the last four months (at least) trying to rate the 16,000+ songs I have in iTunes at present and found it really annoying that I couldn’t provide a rating to podcasts from my iPod to get them out of my smart playlist of unrated material. Eventually, I stumbled upon this little trick to make it work (and perhaps someone else has already written on this—I didn’t bother looking). I have the 4G U2 Edition, but I assume this works on all clickwheel iPod varients (and possibly even the older models).

1. While listening to a podcast you want to rate, pause it;
2. Click to advance to the next track;
3. Provided that is a song (and not another podcast), click to the rating screen;
4. Quickly hit the back button until you are on the hidden rating screen for the podcast;
5. Provide your rating (quickly) and then hit pause again to resume playing the podcast (which will resume where you left off).

It’s a wierd little hack, but it works.