Sam Soffes

So today I moved my blog from Ruby on Rails on SliceHost to Jekyll on GitHub. It only took a two hours to figure it out and move everything over.

The main reason for moving to the new setup (besides the fact that I love redoing my blog for some reason) was being able to manage all of my posts via Markdown files locally, then pushing then up with Git when I had a good version.Jekyll lets me do this easily and quickly.

I'm going to give this a shot for now. I don't really want to write a blogging platform, even thought I've written a ton. I just like programming. Now that I have more projects than I have time for, I'm looking for something simple that I can simply post with. When I roll my own solution, I end up working on it for a few hours each time instead of just writing my post.

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I'm moving to Dallas. For real. I know I've said I'm moving here and there over the past few months, but I already have a place to live and such in Dallas so it's official this time.

I started working for Tasteful Works a few weeks ago. Tasteful Works develops iPhone, Android, Rails, and Mac apps (I only work on iPhone, Mac, and Rails there). It's good times. I am running all of my freelance through there now, so if you want to hire me, contact Tasteful Works. It's all the same rates as when I was doing it on my own just faster because we have more people.

I'm moving to Dallas because that is where all of the Tasteful Works guys are. I'm pretty excited about it, but sad about leaving all of my friends, my band, and my house.

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I spoke at the Awesome Inc. Mobile miniConference in Lexington, KY over the weekend with Jake Behrens. About 100 people showed up for the event. I think its awesome that that many people have an interest in iPhone development in Lexington, KY. I did three sessions. My my two technical ones ("Scrolling Like Butter" and "Web Services with Cocoa") didn't have too many attenders, but "How I Made an App that Has Over a Million Users" seemed to be a hit.

This session was a non-technical overview of how to make a successful app. Download slides PDF.

This session was a technical discussion of how to make table views scroll well. See Atebit's blog post for sample code and further reading. Download slides PDF.

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So today I was wondering how to get the user's time zone on the iPhone. So I googled it up. I found a forum thread that said look at NSTimeZone. Easy enough.

All I had to do was [NSTimeZone localTimeZone]. Awesome. I love Cocoa.

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Update: This no longer works on 3.1.

Update: There are simpler instructions at http://9to5mac.com/iPhone-3G-tethering. I have heard rumors that this no longer works with iTunes 8.2. I personally haven't tried it in awhile.

So with iPhone 3.0 you can tether you computer to your iPhone, but not yet for some carriers. It's pretty dang sweet and works really well so let's do it early. It's actually pretty easy to get setup. I would write an app to automate it, but I'm sure Apple will release an update and break all of this soon, so follow my steps to get going.

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