So we all know that there are plenty of iPhone fans, myself included. Yet we also know that Apple sometimes makes some seriously mediocre decisions when it comes to short-changing its customers.

viewmymessage.com. Just type that into The Google and watch the rants scroll by. It has to be the worst friggin site on the planet. Honestly, I hate to be one of those venom-spewing, self-righteous, blogging nightmares with a keyboard, but truly I have to say to Apple's product managers, "WTF!?!"

I don't care that AT&T's web developers can't keep the thing running. Or that it doesn't work at all some of the time. I can't count the number of times I type the correct message ID and password in and it tells me I have the wrong message ID or that it just fails. And yes, I tried the zero instead of the "O". Bottom line - this service is crap. It's not ethical to cripple this and someone should step up.

In software, we'd call this godforsaken service a "Hack" and not a great one at that. It's closer to a "kludge" really. What I love is that the URL that comes into the phone doesn't have the message ID and password in a querystring so you have to write this shit down and re-key. Don't tell me that's for security's sake. It's not over SSL so everything's clear text anyway. And if someone can read my password over my shoulder for this one MMS message, then they have Supervision and congratulations, you can view the pic of my kid spitting up. And you're not saving viewmymessage from brute force attacks because anyone that understands form submission can write a PHP Curl script to pound away - they can use POST instead of GET.

I love a lot of what Apple does. I hear some good stories about people who work there and the stuff they do. Great. But when I hear people rant about how bad MS is, sometimes I'm forced to remember my old first generation Intel macbook that didn't even have the courtesy to imitate the BSOD or even hang - it would just shut off.

And now I add to the list of Apple bogusness, viewmymessage.com.

This isn't really news for anybody that loosely keep track of Mac news, but for redundancy's sake, I'll post my blurb. MacHeist is having their annual "killer" bundle sale.

I'll do reviews of each piece of software as I get to it. I think I have 12-14 new apps so it could take a while...

In any case, I'm having a good time with Times. It's an nice, easy way to read all the RSS feeds I've been accumulating. I think it's going to become even more useful as RSS and social networking are growing hand-in-hand.

I've been using Apple's Mail for my feeds which, while convenient because I'm always in Mail, has a pretty bare bones UI so overall it's probably not a win. I have a feeling that Times is going to actually make the process a little more efficient.

The only thing that irked me out-of-the-box is that I couldn't find an intuitive way to sort my feeds within the same "column". It kept defaulting to some bogus order that wasn't apparent. Maybe it's based on the order of the feeds as they are imported/added? Not sure, but whatever is up, I didn't figure it out in 30 seconds (and yes, I at least checked the Help menu), so I'll probably pester their support or forum when I get a chance.

Dave "dellus" Dellovo is working for himself. One of the best designers I've worked with: http://hcodestx.com/hcs_showcase.htm

I am looking for an experienced, reliable and competent Joomla developer

I am not looking for someone to install Joomla at their inexpensive hosting company for a turnkey website.
I am not looking for someone who just knows how to look through module files in order to tweak some HTML in pico or notepad.
I am not looking for someone whose knowledge of Joomla stops at installing a template and setting up the Contact Us page

I am looking for a developer that is familiar with the Joomla 1.5.x framework and isn't afraid to create a component, module, or plugin from scratch. You should understand MVC in Joomla, revel in the wonders of JRequest and love to work within one of the world's best CMS.

You should be strong in OO, php5, MySQL and happily work with source control. Knowledge of Wordpress and/or VBulletin is a plus.

This is a freelance situation in which there would be well-defined development tasks that would come with with some advance notice.

Some assignments would be small. Maybe a day or 2 of work. Others could be weeks or months. If you already have some clients, this could be ideal for you to round out your client-base.

If this sounds good to you, please contact me

Here's a MAMP specific hack for finding what MySQL queries are killing your application.

First, backup /Applications/MAMP/bin/startMysql.sh

Next, pop open /Applications/MAMP/bin/startMysql.sh in your favorite text editor
You should see something like this:

You want to add in this string to that command:
--log-slow-queries=/Applications/MAMP/logs/slow_query_log

So the file contents should look like:

Save out the file, restart MAMP, start hitting pages and monitor the file, /Applications/MAMP/logs/slow_query_log

This should be fine for MAMP 1.4.1. YMMV may vary, depending on your MySQL version. The concept is the same, but the syntax can change in later versions.

You might want to implement this tweak to your Virtuemart files in order to avoid Google complaining about your product pages containing identical meta descriptions.

I am not a Virtuemart expert and I might end up finding a config that gets around this. However, when I first set up my store I noticed that the product pages all contained a default meta description. The category pages grabbed the category descriptions just fine but the product pages needed help.

Open up /components/com_virtuemart/themes/default/templates/product_details/flypage.tpl.php in vi/emacs/TextEdit/whatever. All you need are the following 2 lines:

I would place these near the top of the file, possibly just after